 |
| The Cyborg (Fe)Man/ual |
 |
| Appearance What does it/s/he look like? We went around the room to get a sense of what people had been imagining the cyborg to look like over the semester. Here are the responses: Elijah -- Some obvious robotic element, the ability to change its appearance. Quasi-human, quasi-robotic. Laura -- humanoid. no specific gender, color, or skin. Dale -- Yod, an unborn child [referring to Marge Piercy's fictional cyborg in He, She, and It]. Ann -- I can't picture it Gaia -- a Caucasian baby. we have to decide what its astrological sign will be, because that will determine so much Ivy -- the car from Knight Rider, David, an old African-American person, gay, and in a wheelchair. Gwen -- That relates to so many of these questions! How can I do that without answering these questions? If I am its parent, it might be humanoid. If I have some other relationship to it, it might be different. Dale -- Yeah, we might as well just be computer programmers. Gaia -- But remember the "org" part of cyborg! Laura -- remember that Tyson asks "does it have material form?" Somehow, we never got a response from Tyson. Perhaps the lack of his voice here allows you, the reader, to imagine this cyborg yourself. In short, it seems that we are imagining multiple types of cyborgs, and many of them may not have material form. Given our caveats above, this might be a good thing. Second, flowing from the above, we asked: does it have a material form? We're not sure that a cyborg must have material form, but it seems so from our current thinking that it probably must. This may become less of a question in the future. Third, we asked: Is it singular or plural? Dale said, perhaps with some irony: "It will be much easier to control if it is singular." It seems very essential to note that in these discussions, we have been assuming its singular form. We seem to associate sentience and personhood to singularity. The idea of shared personhood or shared consciousness is creepy to us. Individuality is central to Western modern culture. Or even if it does not share, but consists of multiple personalities, what is that about? Part of what the cyborgian nature is that explosion of boundaries (male/female, human/non-human, etc) -- where does the cyborg end? Can it ever be singular, non-shared? Hanging in the air, too, was Dale's statement above. Do we really want to control the cyborg? What would this mean? (See below on autonomy) Fourth, we asked: can it change its features, or change into something else? Elijah was the person who was most committed to having it be able to change its physical form (as you can see in his preface). This seemed fundamental to him. Some questions that flowed from this discussion were: If we limit it from physical change, does that limit it from knowledge/experiential change? Could it benefit from having multiple experiences (i.e. changing from a "white man" to "black woman")? These questions about capacities for change relate closely to ideas of personhood and agency. Fifth, we asked: will it be beyond race, gender, class, age, etc, and how? Or, if it has race, gender, class, age, how will this information be represented in physical form? Our terse response: maybe it will be many races, genders, class, age. Maybe it will be none. David notes: we were getting tired at this point. But it was important to raise the question, and to keep raising it. Here are some other questions we didn't have the opportunity to respond to directly: How big is it? If so, how will it be embodied? Is it humanoid? Will it "pass" as human? Will it have (functional) genitals? What kind? David said: "Let's table genitals for a moment...," and we never got back to them. |