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Cyborg
Consciousness
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 Cyborg:
Engineering the Body Electric by Diane Greco
This title is published on a 3.5" disk (Mac and
Windows).
Part human and part machine, the cyborg is a familiar
figure in cyberpunk science fiction. But this figure looms ever larger
-- as metaphor and as reality -- in all our lives. Today, cyborgs are
real; in cyberspace, we are all cyborgs. Greco explores the significance
of the cyborg in 20th century writing. from Thomas Pynchon and William
Gibson to Haraway and Derrida. The cyborg is more than just an
interesting fiction; Cyborg: Engineering The Body Electric explores
cyborg's impact on political action and personal identity.
After reading Cyborg, you'll never again look at your
body (or someone else's) quite the same way.
"If cyborgs know about anything, they know about
parts. Spare parts, parts and wholes, prostheses, replacements,
enhancements. How do you make sense of all these pieces? After the
disaster, when things fall apart, cyborgs know how to stitch themselves
back together."
About the Author
Diane Greco is acquisitions editor at Eastgate. A graduate of Brown
University, she earned her doctorate in the History of Science from MIT.
She lives in Boston.
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here for more information on this book
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here for more Cyborg books
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here for more Philosophy Books
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Kristopher Krug, Editor-in-Chief
We have undergone a digital revolution. How are
the media, technology, and the wired world fundamentally changing who we
are, and how we interact...?
“The clash of ideas brings forth the spark of
truth” —Aboriginal proverb
In every issue of *spark-online we apply this
principle to our idea that the new world of high technology has not only
created a new "e-society"—it has created a new understanding
of self. We call this new understanding of self, "electronic
consciousness." Technology hasn’t changed only our societies—it
has fundamentally changed us. *spark-online is at the vanguard of
recognising, and attempting to understand this change...
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The Ironic Dream of a Common Language for
Women in the Integrated Circuit: Science, Technology, and Socialist Feminism in the 1980s
or A Socialist Feminist Manifesto for Cyborgs
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Excerpt related to topics on biology,
computers Other excerpts:
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"A Cyborg Manifesto" is a socialist-feminist
analysis of "women's situation in the advanced technological conditions of postmodern
life in the First World" (Penley, interview cited below). The "elementary units
of socialist-feminist analysis," race, gender, and class are in the process of
transformation. The tools for analysis: Marxist, psychoanalytic, feminist, anthropological
are problematic as they are currently articulated...
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By Steven Mentor, Department of English, University of
Washington, Seattle, WA 98195. By what writing technologies are technologies
represented? And what are the politics of those writing technologies? These must be
important questions for techno-historians; no one genre of representation determines the
reception of technologies like electricity or automobiles, and below any essay on
technology lie buried assumptions of what might constitute adequate and inadequate,
normative and abnormal structures of representation. |
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Cyborgs
explained...
This site includes
pages on:
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Excerpts related to topics on immunology,
militarism, and post-industrial capitalism.
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By Michael Joyce. Explorations of feminist and other
visionary texts about body, mind, machine, resistance, contradiction,
virtuality, the
breakdown of dualisms and the demise of hierarchies. (List of texts for a Class with
excerpts)
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Here are some sites concerned with the effects of computer
mediated communication on human thought and human bodies. Includes a link to some
excellent e-texts about cyborgs.
Including:
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By Billy Grassie. This article is a close reading of
two essays by Donna Haraway on feminist philosophy, the biophysical sciences, and
critical social theory. Haraway's strong social constructionist approach to science is
criticized by colleague Sandra Harding, resulting in an epistemological
reconceptualization of objectivity by Haraway. Haraway's notion of "Situated
Knowledges" provides a workable epistemology for all social and biophysical
sciences, while inviting the reintegration of religions as critical conversation partners
in an emancipatory hermeneutics of nature, culture, and technology.
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Brown University's Cyberspace, Hypertext, and Critical Theory
Web
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By George P. Landow, Professor of English and Art History. Haraway
on the Cyborg: A cyborg is a cybernetic mechanism, a hybrid of machine and organism, a
creature of social reality as well as a creature of fiction. Social reality is lived
social relations, our most important political construction, a world-changing fiction. The
international women's movements have constructed 'women's experience', as well as
uncovered or discovered this crucial collective object. This experience is a fiction and
fact of the most crucial, political kind. |
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By George P. Landow, Professor of English and Art History. Such
blurring boundaries between man and machine provides Donna Haraway, who has taught an
entire generation of theorists to think in terms of the cyborg paradigm, to found a
theorical approach that can counter the destructive dualisms that she believes inform the
western tradition... |
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By George P. Landow, Professor of English and Art History. Like
Bakhtin's multivocality and Derrida's decentering, Haraway's cyborg , attacks and opens up
false, imposed unities that form as univocality. |
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By George P. Landow, Professor of English and Art History. According
to Donna J. Haraway, There are several consequences to taking seriously the imagery
of cyborgs as other than our enemies. Our bodies, ourselves; bodies are maps of power and
identity. Cyborgs are no exception. A cyborg body is not innocent; it was not born in a
garden; it does not seek unitary identity and so generate antagonistic dualisms without
end (or until the world ends); it takes irony for granted. |
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By George P. Landow, Professor of English and Art History. According
to Donna J. Haraway, cyborg imagery can "help express" what she takes to be the
crucial point that the production of universal, totalizing theory is a major
mistake that misses most of reality, probably always, but certainly now; and second,
taking responsibility for the social relations of science and technology means refusing an
anti-science metaphysics, a demonology of technology, and so means embracing the skillful
task of reconstructing the boundaries of daily life, in partial connection with others, in
communication with all of our parts. |
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By Robert M. Young. This began life as a talk given at
Nottingham Polytechnic, in which I attempted to re-think the concept of ideology in the
light of social constructivism, especially the astonishing achievement of Donna Haraway in
Primate Visions. Much revised, it appeared in Science as Culture (no. 15) 3:165-207,1992
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List of links to sites about cyborgs, cyber
thought, and
cyberpunks.
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Donna Haraway, whose intriguing "Cyborg
Manifesto" has been cited extensively in literature on the future of gender
construction, also focuses on technologies that provide for the physical recreation of the
body rather than the virtual creation that text-based CMC technology addresses.
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Links relating to cyber thought and postindustrial art.
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Extensive list of e-texts and site links.
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