Cyborg/essay

The cyborg/essay

1

When I was in college – heck, when I was in graduate school in the 80’s – I read books and articles, xeroxed stuff, wrote in longhand and typed it up on an electric typewriter. I have no, repeat no, nostalgia for this process. It pretty much sucked for me. I typed slowly, badly, mistyped a word for every six I got right, and plodded along well behind my thought process. When a paragraph was typed it was practically as if I’d set it in type, a la Ben Franklin; it would take what seemed like a huge amount of effort to introduce whole new sentences, not to mention new ideas or revisions. I can even remember m hands poised above the keyboard, knowing that what I’d written was, if not something I completely disagreed with, at least something I’d moved on to qualify, reconsider, think better of. Should I stop and handwrite the new stuff and then go back and type again? What time is it? How much energy do I have? And often the paper would go out with me knowing it was not the best representation of my own thoughts. (Yes I know this is always already the case with all writing, but it is different to send out your work knowing the paper was at C and you’d gotten at least to C.2 or even D).

On the other hand, the typewriter was more or less mute. It sat there as a testimony to my bad skills as a worker bee, but it never vibrated to let me know that someone, somewhere, was thinking of me and trying to contact me. (If it had, that would have been the moment to consider what things I’d put in my body that evening). It never morphed, like something out of Kronenberg’s 1983 cult flick Videodrome, into a television set that reached out to grab me or swallow me or invite me into its suddenly more real than real interior.

In other words, it didn’t act like my MacBook.

2

Montaigne more or less invented the modern essay, or essai. I love essay because I love the way multiple meanings inhere in the word and thus in the writing of essays. The noun essay (as taken by Francis Bacon in imitation of Montaigne as translated by the Elizabethan Florio) means trial, attempt, and comes from the Late Latin exagium "a weighing, weight," from L exigere "test," from ex- "out" (see ex-) + agere (see act) apparently meaning here "to weigh." The writer “acts out” in writing ideas or perceptions not already polished and formed and edited; in writing them down (and out) writers discover if they have merit, but also, discover where they go, how the act of writing takes them from this to this to this. Essay also means "to put to proof, test the mettle of," late 15c., from Middle French essaier, from essai. In English we now use the spelling assay to get at this meaning. So when we attempt some set of ideas in an open form such as the essay, we allow the ideas to be weighed, assayed like ore, to see if we have found gold, or fool’s gold, or both.

The irony of this origin of essay is that for many hundreds of thousands of students in the United States and elsewhere, “essay” has come to mean the opposite: a constricting form by which you show your English teacher you know how to write five paragraphs that include a main idea, topic sentences that refer to (one of three parts of) that main idea, and “development” that often prescribes at least one or two details to support the topic sentence. It bears the same relationship to actual essays that the “compulsories” in competitive ice skating (figure eights, etc etc) have with the breathtaking ice performances of the open round. No one televises the compulsories, is what I’m saying here. And no one would read the five paragraph essays as a product, unless they were content with a pretty elementary level of writing and thinking.

3

The reason I want to talk about “cyborg” essays and cyborg/essay is that the wandering view point of Montaigne’s wonderful, self contradicting, serpentine writing process has a parallel in the wandering I do when I sit down to write with my badly named “laptop computer.” Really it is a Videodrome portal to multiple realities, the Internet and its Tao of 10,000 things, its instant messaging and Facebook apps that alert me to someone somewhere in the world wanting my attention, its music library capable of playing 101 gigs of music for 50.5 days in a row, its Skype link and photo library and Burning Man widgets and Remote desktop connection to other servers.

So. I began working on my writing the other night, and was looking at the origins of cyborgs and cybernetics. This came out of my dissertation; I am trying to revise the way I introduce the notion of the cyborg in proto-cyborg short stories of the forties and fifties, and in the writings about cybernetics that come from this period. This led me to consider an essay by Porush titled The Cyborg was a Bomb, in which he argue the connection between the atomic bomb and the cybernetic revolution which was in its was every bit as dangerous – perhaps more so – to the living breathing world of humans and animals.

It occurred to me that so many of the superheroes from this period get their powers from atomic or nuclear accidents. Spiderman (bit by a radioactive bug), the Thing from Fantastic Four, The Hulk…and I wondered how this played for adults and children of the fifties and early sixties, living out the endgame of World War 2 and the atomic shadow cast over the entire planet by the Cold War’s arms race. I am more or less one of those kids (born in 1954) and I have memories of waking up at night from dreams of protecting my family from Russians who were climbing the hill behind my house from Route 91. I remember in the dream feeling that I could kill other humans if I had to protect my mom and dad, and the feel of an automatic weapon in my hand as I perched on the crest of the hill and laid fire down at the demonic invaders.

This led me to wander the web looking for evidence of other comic characters; in particular, I was looking for any sign of radioactive rabbits (since my net avatar name since 1992 has been cybunny, well before NeoPets, and my nickname since 1980 has been Rabbit). I found what I was looking for:

The comic came out in 1955: a starving lonely rabbit gains super powers after eating a carrot from a carrot patch containing uranium. Later on in his career, he changed his name to Atomic Bunny.

These Charlton comics are, imho, unbelievably bad, and I knew this as a kid reading tons of comics (usually in the very old school Springfield Mass. barber shop my dad took us to for our biweekly buzz cuts). But I found lot of other examples of fifties fascination with how we might alter the organic body, via radiation and drugs. The comparison of Atomic Rabbit with Atomic Mouse (whose potent image tops this blog) is relevant here, in the words of Toonopedia’s Don Markstein:

[Atomic Mouse] too, got his super powers from doubly forbidden fruit by today's standards — drugs and radiation. But while both their power-enhancers were as radioactive as can be, Mouse's was more blatantly a drug. He got his super powers from U-235 pills, whereas Rabbit's U-235 carrots could be passed off as good nutrition, like Atomictot's vitamins and Popeye's spinach. But while Popeye of the E.C. Segar comics ate lots of spinach for strength through nutrition, the animated Popeye treated it like a drug, getting a huge rush from it and sometimes, just for emphasis, sucking it in through his pipe. [http://www.toonopedia.com/atomicrb.htm]

In my dissertation I talk about the move in the fifties from direct assaults on the abject bodies of the institutionalized (shock treatment, lobotomy) to the more humane application of psychopharmacology (the tricyclic antidepressants discovered in the early fifties, beginning with chlorpromazine). In fact, the “fathers” of the cyborg, Nathan Kline and Manfred Clynes, were part of what has been called the “explosive birth” of psychopharmacology during this period, working at Rockland State Hospital in New York, and the original cyborg article from 1960 shows the powerful influence of this new exciting door into altering human behavior and consciousness. In fact, the Wikipedia article on chlorpromazine asserts,

The introduction of chlorpromazine into clinical use has been described as the single greatest advance in psychiatric care, dramatically improving the prognosis of patients in psychiatric hospitals worldwide; the availability of antipsychotic drugs curtailed indiscriminate use of electroconvulsive therapy and psychosurgery, and was one of the driving forces behind the deinstitutionalization movement. [“Chlorpromazine,” Wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chlorpromazine).

Notice the crazy ride here; the internet allows one to move quickly from topic to topic, in a associative way, much as Montaigne’s essay form allowed him to think outside the very clumsy box of 16^th century thought and writing (with its elaborate medieval argument forms based on pedantic use of authorities, that is, the authority of the Church).

This associative element then is “disciplined” by the acting out of the associations in writing, that is, in the open essay form of this blog. And I haven’t even remotely touched on all the association that were taking place during this small selection of moves made possible by my Videodrome machine that doubles as a writing tool.

This blog/essay form allows for a weaving of materials not normally connected, and for a wider scope of argument that then is open to “assay” or testing. Are these links useful, informative, productive? Are some simply not relevant, or distracted surfing of the web? I want to argue that to understand how we as humans reacted both to the Atomic bomb as a mega-cyborg tool (and used only by massive nation-states like USSR and the US and a few others, rather like the Gundam in later Japanese sci fi anime) and to the other cybernetic products that would produce the image and discourse of the cyborg, we need to weave a web of multiple sources, including popular ones. We need to deploy cultural criticism of these materials because they show how rarefied discourses from science and technology are represented to very wide ranges of people (including especially children, but also including otherwise critical adults who may be ideologically blindsided by cultural narratives).

Next: after Atomic Rabbit, THEM!