Cyborg Worlds: The Military Information Society ed. by Les Levidow, Kevin Robins

Abstract

technology and culture Book Reviews 1131 who seek to fill the gaps in the existing literature will find this book a useful resource. Stephen Hilgartner Dr. Hilgartner, a sociologist, is an assistant professor at the Center for the Study of Society and Medicine, Columbia University. His current research concerns the social world of genome mapping and sequencing. Cyborg Worlds: The Military Information Society. Edited by Les Levidow and Kevin Robins. London and New York: Free Association Books and Columbia University Press (distributor), 1989. Pp. 186; refer­ ences, index. $35.00. The cyborg—a being both human and machine—preoccupies mainstream Western imagination. Fembots, robocops, cyberpunks, and transformers abound in literature, film, toys, comic books, and advertising. Despite this domesticated cyborg, the authors repre­ sented in Cyborg Worlds argue that this postmodern icon signifies a fusion between military paradigms and information technology, and that military values ineluctably guide infotech’s “research, develop­ ment and application—in areas ranging from advanced weaponry to industrial design to educational methods” (p. 8). In other words, underlying such cyborg worlds as video games, advertising, home appliances, and the modern office is a common “search for total control through simulation” and “the desire to shape people into perfectly flexible ‘human components’ of a control system” (p. 8), reducing human behavior to that of a machine, and the social order (in Mumford’s words) to a megamachine. Moreover, infotech systems and the various cyborg worlds all promote new models of human subjectivity, rationality, cognition, and intelligence—all of which are compromised, since derived from military worldviews. David Noble argues that “cyborg” values are militarizing education, evidenced in the current emphasis “on thinking, intelligence, problem­ solving and learning strategies” (p. 21), all grounded in a computer model of the learner’s mind. In his interdisciplinary “The Cyborg Soldier,” Chris Gray draws on popular culture and the writings of military strategists to propose an understanding of postmodern war and warriors. Postmodern war requires soldiers created through the “psychotechnologies of drugs, discipline and management” (p. 44) to suit the requirements of high-technology weapons. Gray concludes by examining the challenges to postmodern war posed by those (including feminists, pagans, Native Americans) who appropriate the concepts of warrior and cyborg, turning them into emblems of resistance. A thoughtful essay by Dennis Hayes examines the milieu and mindsets of professional workers who design and build advanced 1132 Book Reviews TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE weaponry, concentrating on military secrecy enforced through ex­ treme fragmentation of labor and self-censorship. Vincent Mosco regards as secondary the debate over whether SDI (“Star Wars”) could ever work. Rather, he insists, we must look at its profound ability to institutionalize further militarism in Western society. Other essays by Tom Athansiou and Paul Edwards explore the fetishization of artifi­ cial intelligence in military paradigms and the confluence of systems engineering and military thinking toward a “closed-world discourse.” Finally, the editors further define their understanding of the “military information society” as well as the notion of a “cyborg self” that seems to contain the postmodern subject’s “contradictory feelings of omnip­ otence and powerlessness, of mastery and dependence” (p. 173) but achieves this by denying the body and fostering an illusion of total control over one’s self and one’s environment. All of these essays stem from a Left, antimilitarist, and often Marxist perspective, taking leads from the criticism of technology/machine culture spearheaded by Lewis Mumford. They solidly support the volume’s thesis—that the goals and practices of information technology are rooted in its military origins, and that those often blissfully imagined cyborg worlds must be inspected for structural flaws—and are informative and thought provoking. The editors and contributors hasten to assure the reader that they are not sketching out a military-information system of perfected control, but one that should be subjected to criticism so that it might be subverted. Here, however, is the central flaw of this work. The contributors, all men and probably all of European ancestry, are simply too homogeneous. Central to the project of challenging the total control they deplore is opening up the dialogue to marginalized voices—those feminists, pagans, Native Americans, and other subversives referred to by Gray...