 |
| The Cyborg (Fe)Man/ual |
| < -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------> |
 |
| David Valentine's Preface and Introduction The Cyborg (Fe)Man/ual is a collaborative project of seven students in the advanced undergraduate seminar, Anthropology of the Future, that I taught at Sarah Lawrence College, in 2003 and 2004. The students were: Ann Fountain, Gaia Fried, Laura Jacobs, Elijah Johnston-Heck, Libby Pokel, Tyson Siddle, and Dale Wallain. Other students who contributed to this project were Ivy Blackman and Gwendolyn Kaminski. At the beginning of the second semester of Anthropology of the Future, these seven students agreed to collaborate on a project to "program a cyborg," or, alternately, "build a cyborg." Of course, the goal was not to build a physical creature, but to consider the kinds of information and knowledge that their cyborg might have. In this project, they were guided by our readings of, in particular, Donna Haraway's work and Marge Piercy's novel He, She, and It. In these books, the cyborg has come to stand as a vision of the future and of future personhood, and so it seemed a perfect figure through which to have these students think about the implications of imagining futures. These discussions were also animated by a broad range of other texts which take on (among other topics): aliens, modernity, psychics, power, Star Trek, sexuality, architecture, "cargo cults," gender, Zambian copper miners, race, space travel, personhood, cloning, knowledge, language, religion, and, of course, the future (The syllabi for the fall and spring semesters are available here). Each student undertook their own individual web-based project, exploring some aspect of cyborg futures (go to the (Fe)Man/ual home page for a link to the main "Anthropology of the Future" project page), and during group meetings discussed their individual projects as well as the corporate task of "programming" their cyborg. The project of "programming a cyborg" took on a different shape as the semester developed, however. As students discussed their individual projects, and debated what their cyborg would be, look like, and do, a range of questions arose: what was their relationship to this cyborg? Would they be its parents, its/her/his creator, its god? What would the cyborg be capable of? Would he/she/it be autonomous or not? Perhaps most debated was the question of its purpose. Some students wanted the cyborg to have a very specialized purpose (Gaia's interest was in having it dedicated to recycling), but this brought up the question of whether it was fair to restrict a sentient being to a single task, what this would mean for the creature's autonomy, and how such a purpose would be maintained. Others (especially Gwen) asked whether the economic conditions for the production of a cyborg (i.e. most likely in a corporate environment where the profitability of its production would be a significant factor) would enable any engagement of the kinds of questions they ended up asking. Further, given our reading of Haraway's Modest Witness, there was a question about whether the cyborg they were thinking about would be a creature constructed from the ground up, like Piercy's Yod, or if it were to be an augmented human. If, as Haraway suggests, we are all already cyborgs, what were the implications of this project? Given the nature of these questions, I suggested that rather than "program a cyborg," it might perhaps be better to think of producing a "manual," a set of guidelines and cautions for those who, in the future, might have the capacities to create a sentient cyborg in the sense of a human-made creature. Drawing on Haraway's play with words, and the feminist concerns at the heart of her work, I further suggested we think of it as a "femanual." The construction "(Fe)Man/ual" was conceived by Libby, a further play on the word "manual," comprising a complex gendering of the cyborg in which the subscript "e" of the first term also indexes the periodic table symbol for "iron" [note that I have been unable to achieve a subscript "e" in this web version, but it should be read as such]. The iron-ness (perhaps irony?) of this construction indexes the made-ness of the cyborg, an implicit nod to the fashioning of the person which underpins our investigations into future imaginings and the possibilities and pitfalls of imagining futures. If, as we have come to realize, imagining futures also shapes those futures, the recognition of fashioning stands at the center of these students' imaginings of their cyborg. Along with it comes a recognition of the responsibilities of imagining a future, a created sentient being, and the hopes that come along with its fashioning. So, the (Fe)Man/ual has evolved to be, rather than a series of programming instructions, a set of critical questions aimed at giving future cyborg-builders pause to think about what they are doing. In the end, it is really a set of questions and ruminations about personhood and power, knowledge and agency. If these questions are read outside the cyborg paradigm, it is clear that they are also questions about what it means to be human. If we are all cyborgs (as Haraway might have it), then these are questions we should ask about ourselves and our fashionings of our own worlds. And, they are not just questions about the future: they are questions we should ask here and now. I have urged students throughout this process to recognize what others (like Henrietta Moore or Brian Ott and Eric Aoki, or Donna Haraway) have urged us to think about: that imagining the future (and a future cyborg) is a huge responsibility. We are always constrained in these imaginings by what we know, and what has gone before, but that which we imagine already constrains that which will come to be. We have learnt to be cautious of utopias (which are totalizing, teleological, smooth), yet also recognize that, as Henrietta Moore writes: " It is precisely because utopias do function as a commentary on the present, and as a vision of the future that they may actually be necessary to our understanding of social and political change" (1990:30-31). The actual production of the (Fe)Man/ual was undertaken in three classes at the end of the spring semester. In the first of these classes, students generated a range of critical questions which were transcribed by Ann, Dale, and Libby. In the final two classes, we tried to respond to some of these questions B in the end, we realized we had far more than we could deal with. What amazed and encouraged me was the seriousness with which these students undertook the process, recognizing how important it was to ask these questions, and to offer their responses that resisted final answers, totalizing visions, and absolutes. This is not to say that there were not tensions and differences of opinion in the room: but, indeed, the engagement of such differences are central to the process of critical thinking, especially when it is directed at the future. As such, we have tried to keep as many of the differences of opinion present and insistent in the text. In the very final class, we had to work hard to make ourselves heard over a ferocious and powerful thunder and lightening storm. The irony of this was not lost on anyone, as we recalled Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. Frequently, one of the questions raised would be interrupted by a deafening clap of thunder and a dazzling lightening flash. While there was much (nervous) laughter as we persevered through the process, the punctuation of our discussion with the raw energy of the storm somehow underlined the seriousness of the process that we B like Donna Haraway, like Avram in He, She, and It, and like Dr. Frankenstein himself B were undertaking. At its heart, the (Fe)Man/ual aims to open up a series of questions focused on democratic and utopian futures, and what it might mean to make a sentient being. But it is simultaneously a document that is located in contemporary concerns about the future, and about what it means to be a person/cyborg in the present. Like all future thinking, the (Fe)Man/ual is a dangerous necessity of the present. References Cited: Haraway, Donna 1997 Modest_Witnsess@Second_millennium. FemaleMan8_meets_OncoMouseJ: feminism and technoscience. New York: Routledge. Moore, Henrietta L. 1990 'Visions of the good life': anthropology and the study of utopia. Cambridge Anthropology 14(3):13 33. Ott, B. L.; Aoki, E. 2001 Popular Imagination and Identity Politics: Reading the Future in Star Trek: The Next Generation. Western Journal of Communication 65(4):392 415 Piercy, Marge 1991 He, she, and it. New York: Fawcett Crest. |