Cyborg Self Research Articles

Performing the cyborg self: explicit and implicit examples of body hacking the distributed self

ABSTRACT Today, as many work and socialize completely online, we are more acutely aware than ever of the cybernetic relationship between the body (in-situ) and the virtually or digitally extended self. However, even before the onset of the current global pandemic (COVID-19), the contemporary ‘body’ had to be understood as extended beyond physical flesh, through global communications systems. How do our practices on these platforms reveal our evolving relationships with a distributed and digitally mutable body? Drawing on my own construction of cyborg theory as a subset of posthuman discourse, this paper links the practices of explicitly cyborg performance, like Stelarc and ORLAN, with the increasingly banal practice of body-hacking as it is realized in the performance of the self (both consciously and unconsciously) on distributed, social media platforms. These discussions touch both on identified trends in contemporary self-representation as well as artists whose work within those spaces acts as a comment, critique, and application of those practices. Through this discussion, I show how these practices can be understood as body hacking and how that body hacking can both reflect an increasing sense of personal empowerment in relation to the body as well as a morally ambiguous algorithmic redefinition of the paradigmatic body.

Flaws in the highlightreal: fitstagram diptychs and the enactment of cyborg embodiment

This article inverts Donna Haraway’s proposition that ‘the ideologically charged question of what counts as daily activity, as experience, can be approached by exploiting the cyborg image’ by instead exploiting everyday experience to approach the contemporary cyborg. It utilises digital tools to compile a corpus of Instagram posts that foreground corporeal hybridity, and examines this social media data through the lenses of feminist STS, affect theory and digital studies. This strategy offers a new vantage on the cyborg by connecting it to concrete and ongoing user practices. To make these interventions, this project focuses specifically on a genre of post popularised by Instagram fitness (or fitstagram) influencers – diptych photographic montages that oppose imperfectly ‘real’ material bodies to unrealistically ‘perfect’ media bodies. Although they formally rely on binary logics (real v. perfect, offline v. online), the posts simultaneously deconstruct them in a number of ways. These repeated boundary transgressions reflect users’ lived experiences of hybrid online/offline corporeality and help forward a theory of cyborg embodiment that relies on quotidian practices as opposed to fixed products or identities. Moreover, close engagement with a final dataset of eighty-nine posts illuminates three particular modes of enacting the cyborg corpus on Instagram: occupation of multiple bodies, awareness of the analogue body and anxious boundary-work. This research extends the cyborg as a critical figure by situating it within a social media context, attending to its imbrication in everyday practices, and affirming female Instagram users as theorists of their cyborg selves.

Dis/Corporatization: The Biopolitics of Prosthetic Lives and Posthuman Trauma in Ghost in the Shell Films

This paper explores the biopolitics both implicit and explicit in Mamoru Oshii’s film duology Ghost in the Shell. The prostheticization of life for Major Motoko Kusanagi is based upon an objectification of a cyborg self enabled and literalized through technology that is also a (mis)representation that conflates the biological self and technological self, and Oshii further problematizes this representation with the complication of the commodification and trafficking of posthuman lives, explicitly examined in more critical detail in the second film, Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence. In other words, Oshii arguably imagines the extreme end of biopower in a posthuman world as human trafficking structured by a globalized political economy.

The Intellective Space: Thinking Beyond Cognition by Laurent Dubreuil

Reviewed by: The Intellective Space: Thinking Beyond Cognition by Laurent Dubreuil Josh Doty Laurent Dubreuil, The Intellective Space: Thinking Beyond Cognition Posthumanities series Minneapolis and London University of Minnesota Press, 2015, 171 pp. Laurent Dubreuil's recent book, part of the Posthumanities series at the University of Minnesota Press, seeks to push beyond cognition, defined as "the minimal level" of "mental operations," and into another territory altogether (3). Specifically, the book delineates (and celebrates) "the intellective space," the mental zone of cognitive excess and failure wherein "thought and knowledge are performed and shared" at the moment of the present (3). "The intellective," Dubreuil writes, is both "a possible name for the productive undoing of cognition per se" and a way of addressing "the potential journey of ideas" that go beyond the base-level cognitive processes that are the subject of the cognitive sciences (3). In doing so, Dubreuil's work orients the reader, in surprising and productive ways, towards the virtues of intellective contradiction, ephemerality, unpredictability, performance, and even chaos. Ultimately, he offers new ways to structure connections between the humanities with the sciences of mind. The book unfolds in two parts, "The Intellective Hypothesis" and "Animal Meditations," which together contain one hundred and seven sections—some of these sections are as brief, elusive, and ephemeral as thought itself, and some are longer, weightier investigations. "The Intellective Hypothesis" delineates the foundations, theory, and stakes of intellection. In it, Dubreuil notes that the "material channels" through which cognition passes ("human verbal language, neural synapses, social prescription") cause an "excess of (and to) cognition" that "never completely disappears" and that "shapes our thoughts more than once" (3). This excess is, for Dubreuil, the core of the intellective. He goes on to characterize intellection as "conjectural," "less durable than its cognitive operations," and as "extraordinary, dialogic, defective, and affirmative" (22, 25). Ultimately, the intellective space is a zone of imperfect, ephemeral mental action. "Animal Meditations" asserts that the project of intellective studies requires that "as much as we can, we accept ourselves as constructing and constructed animals," at once "material packs of cells" and "performers of intellection" (94). Doing so, he argues, ultimately allows for a reassessment of what it means to be human: to [End Page 364] be neither wholly somatic nor wholly mental. Here he critiques Donna Haraway's celebration of the cyborg—neural implants, he writes, "would possibly minimize the intellective" of our cyborg selves, "making us highly well-informed and dull animals, with the idiot savant as our ideal" (107). Computers might well mimic cognitive processes, but, Dubreuil asserts, they could not mimic intellection's productive static—that is reserved for "the intellective animal (be it 'human' or not)" (109). Ultimately, he hopes that the "most discursive disciplines" will "speak of, and from, the intellective, in a manner the regular sciences could contribute to but not appropriate," in doing so opening new avenues of collaboration between the humanities and the sciences (110). Readers will notice that The Intellective Space is a challenging read. Stylistically, it is reminiscent of High Theory—dense, allusive, aphoristic, and searching. Most challenging is that the act of reading the book is itself, to inhabit its own terms, an intellective (a productively unpredictable and contradictory) act. Depending on one's expertise, thinking with some sections will be easier than with others. Dubreuil's deep scholarship manifests in the ecumenical sweep of the thinkers, texts, and fields of study he engages: he addresses with equal perspicacity cyborgs, metaphysics, Anaxagoras, Emily Dickinson, analytic philosophy, Catherine Malabou, Kurt Gödel, and the soul. This scope makes the book of interest to a number of fields, but it renders his forays into logic, to give one example, inaccessible to many readers of this journal. Dubreuil acknowledges the difficulty of reading his book: "I know that, by abandoning a more traditional apodictic form (more geometrico), I am making myself less 'readable' by people I would also like to convince" (12). But he insists that of course the book "is not readily applicable, not readily teachable. It is not ready to be delivered, for the present needs to be unpacked" (12). He writes as he does, he says, to emphasize the...

The microsociology of automobility: the production of the automobile self

Drivers and automobiles are frequently represented in the automobility studies literature as hybrid human–machine cyborg assemblages. A concurrent theme within the automobility literature has been the disciplinary processes by which the automobile self is constructed; here, however, it is assumed that the self to be investigated is the self of the driver, not the self of the car-driver entity. In this paper, a neo-Goffmanian account of the construction of this cyborg self is developed. This provides a complementary theoretical framework to those based on the work of Michel Foucault to account for the production of the automobile self.

가상게임에 나타나는 소프트웨어 사이보그특징에 대한 고찰 -PS4 게임을 중심으로-

본 논문은 철학적 관점에서 게임에서 발생되는 가상자아와 가상신체에 대한 소프트웨어사이보그 특성의 변화에 관해 연구한 것이다. 사이보그개념은 넓게 보면 인간과 기계의 결합을 말하지만 구체적으로 들어가면 유기체인 인간과 보철물 같은 기계를 결합하는 하드웨어 사이보그와 인간의 뇌를 전자화시켜 가상신체로 전환시키는 소프트웨어 사이보그가 있다. 가상게임은 두 번째 소프트웨어 사이보그가 적용되는 사례인데, <언틸던>게임 같은 경우 일반적인 사이보그 개념과 다른 가상신체와 가상자아의 특징들이 보여 진다. 이런 특징들을 분석하기 위해 한스모라벡의 소프트웨어사이보그개념과 김선희의 사이버공간 속성과 다중자아개념을 적용하였다. 일반적인 가상게임은 뇌의 유형을 복제한 소프트웨어사이보그로써 가상세계의 속성 때문에 신체가 무효화되는 경향이 있었다. 그러나 <언틸던>게임 같은 경우 3인칭시점과 실존배우를 게임캐릭터로 제작한 점을 본다면 오히려 플레이어의 심리적 동일성을 유지하기 위해 사진 이미지적 사실성을 추구하면서 가상신체의 필요성을 역설하고 있는 것이다. 그리고 게임진행 중 플레이어는 8개의 캐릭터를 교차선택하면서 미션을 완수하게 되는데 이것은 현실자아가 다중자아로 복제되면서 겪게 되는 선택과 경험을 이용해 바람직한 최종엔딩을 이끄는데 큰 역할을 하게 된다. 이러한 사이버 다중자아는 현실세계의 다중자아들에게 비해 적극적이고 긍정적인 특징을 보여주면서 소프트웨어사이보그의 장점으로 부각될 수 있다. <언틸던> 게임의 특징은 최종엔딩이 플레이어의 선택에 따라 달라지고 등장인물간의 우정관계에 따라 친구의 생사가 결정된다는 점이다. 이때 가상자아는 시행착오를 통한 경험적, 도덕적, 직관적 선택의 기준을 자기 나름대로 설정하면서 바람직한 선택을 하려고 노력한다. 또한 다중자아들의 지식을 하나로 융합할 수 있어 한 단계 높은 정신적 성찰을 이루게 된다. 이런 과정은 세계에 대한 자신의 해석을 긍정하고 자기극복을 통해 정신적 성찰의 이루는 인간, 니체가 말한 위버멘쉬가 되는 과정으로 볼 수 있다. This paper is a study of the changing nature of software for virtual Cyborg self and the virtual body that occur in the game from a philosophical point of view. Looking broadly, the cyborg concept refers to the combination of man and machine. Specifically, there is a hardware cyborg organism to combine human and restoration of machine In addition, there is software cyborg by electronic the human brain of converting a virtual body. Virtual games are cases software-Cyborg applied. In the game <untildawn>, There seems to have characteristics of virtual body and ego that different from general cyborg meaning. To analyze the features, I applied the concept of software-cyborg of Hans morabek and the multiple selves in cyberspace properties of Kim Sun-Hee. generally, software cyborg cloning the brain type tended to invalidate the body due to the nature of the virtual world. But If you look at third-person's view and the game character that made from real actors, it is pursuing the realism of photographic images and it stressed the need for a virtual body in order to maintain the psychological identity of the player. And, The game player crosses the eight characters to choose while completing the mission. This is a big role in the reality ego leads to the desired final ending with the selection and experience to be experienced as self-replication to multiple. These cyber multi-ego looks for an active and positive features compared to the multi-ego in the real world and highlights the advantages of the software cyborg. Game <untildawn> The characteristics of the final result varies depending on the selection of the player. The life and death of a friend is determined by the relationship between the characters friendship. In this case, the virtual self is empirically through trial and error, moral, and try to select the desired setting the standard for intuitive and self own choice. Also It can be fused to the knowledge of multiple selves as one step is formed by a high spiritual introspection. This process is a positive interpretation of the world and their own forms of mental reflection through self-overcoming human, Nietzsche is said that the process is Wibeomenswi.

Cyborg Selves in Battlestar Galactica and Star Trek: The Next Generation: Genre, Hybridity, Identity

Cyborg Selves in <i>Battlestar Galactica</i> and <i>Star Trek: The Next Generation</i>: Genre, Hybridity, Identity

Bodies, selves, and human identity: A Conversation Between Transhumanism and the Apostle Paul

In this article I propose the initiation of a conversation between biblical interpreters and proponents of transhumanism. Transhumanists recognize that the rapid expansion of technological innovation is changing our understandings of human behavior, thinking, and physical makeup. The vitality of the post/transhumanism debate about human identity suggests that a “biblical conversation” should be part of a larger conversation not only with theologians, but also the social entities who will hold forth on the values of human/machine transformations. It becomes ever more clear that this debate about human identity will be a real issue in the near future since we will undoubtedly improve our technological capacities and geometrically increase our prosthetic capacities, leading to a possible conclusion that the body itself is best understood as a “prosthesis.” For better or worse, Scripture is and will be adduced on both sides of the debate and often in the form of proof-texting rather than actual consideration of the materials. So, it seems not only reasonable but necessary to reopen the idea of how scriptural materials conceive of the body–self relationship. This is happening in some quarters (e.g. Thweatt-Bates, Cyborg Selves), but the use of biblical materials is not particularly strong. Hence, the viability of this project. This is a first foray into that matter and Paul is a good starting place since the question of the human being as an embodied being occupies a place of importance in many of his letters, especially Romans, 1 and 2 Corinthians, and 1 Thessalonians.

Review of "Cyborg Selves: A Theological Anthropology of the Posthuman" by Jeanine Thweatt-Bates (Ashgate, 2012)

Review of "Cyborg Selves: A Theological Anthropology of the Posthuman" by Jeanine Thweatt-Bates (Ashgate, 2012)

From The City Of Bits to E-Topia

Mitchell's book on the City of Bits, sets out a vision of urban life literally done to bits. His next book e-topia, provides the counter-point to this vision of urban life and scenario where the city is no longer left in bits and pieces, but a place where it ‘all comes together'. As Mitchell states in Me++: the Cyborg Self and the Networked City, all this ‘coming together' becomes possible because the trial separation of bits and atoms is over and the dissolution of the boundaries between virtual and physical space now makes citizenship worth playing for. The landscape which this paper uncovers is different. For it reveals the middle ground between the ‘high-level' issues surrounding e-topia and those lying at the ‘grass roots' level of me ++ and the cyborg-self. This is because it is here and with the likes of Laclau and Mouffe and Zizek, that matters which concern the ‘city of bits' and notion of ‘e-topia' as the ‘me++ of the cyborg self', get ‘bottomed out' as the space, citizenship and community of global strategy.

Objects and Objectivity

This essay examines the sociological works of Harriet Martineau, particularly 1838’s How to Observe Manners and Morals, through the lens of disability studies and Donna Haraway's “Cyborg Manifesto.” The authors argue that Martineau depended, due to her perceived “disabilities” of deafness, illnesses and gender, on objects such as the ear trumpet, the telescope, and various theoretical constructs to mediate her access to the outside world. In doing so, she created a “cyborg self” whose tools allowed her to re-write traditionally masculine concepts such as scientific objectivity. These tools were both actual – the ear trumpet and telescope allowed the detachment and control necessary for the nineteenth-century scientist – and metaphorical – Martineau stressed that her disability forced method, a concept that grew ever more important to scientists as the century progressed. Martineau's disabilities reshaped her into a “cyborg self” who was able to approach questions of scientific objectivity from an un-gendered perspective.

Free software and the political philosophy of the cyborg world

Our freedoms in cyberspace are those granted by code and the protocols it implements. When man and machine interact, co-exist, and intermingle, cyberspace comes to interpenetrate the real world fully. In this cyborg world, software retains its regulatory role, becoming a language of interaction with our extended cyborg selves. The mediation of our extended selves by closed software threatens individual autonomy. We define a notion of freedom for software that does justice to our conception of it as language, sketching the outlines of a social and political philosophy for a cyborg world. In a cyberspace underwritten by free software, political structures become contingent and flexible: the polity can choose to change the extent and character of its participation. The rejection of opaque power is an old anarchist ideal: free software, by making power transparent, carries the potential to place substantive restrictions on the regulatory power of cyborg government.

Book Reviews: ME ++ the Cyborg Self and the Networked City, Advanced Building Simulation

Book Reviews: ME ++ the Cyborg Self and the Networked City, Advanced Building Simulation

Book Reviews

Books reviewed:Michael Sorkin and Sharon Zukin (eds) After the World Trade Center. Rethinking New York CityDeepak Narang Sawhney (ed.) Unmasking L.A.: third worlds and the cityFrancesco lo Piccolo and Huw Thomas (eds) Knights and castles — minorities and urban regenerationPeter Roberts and Hugh Sykes (eds) Urban regeneration: a handbookLeslie M. Harris In the shadow of slavery: African Americans in New York City, 1626–1863John Doling and Janet Ford (eds) Globalisation and home ownership: experiences in eight member states of the European UnionWilliam J. Mitchell ME++, the cyborg self and the networked cityBob Jessop The future of the capitalist state

Me++: The Cyborg Self and the Networked City

Me++: The Cyborg Self and the Networked City

Reviews: History of Regional Science and the Regional Science Association International: The Beginnings and Early History, Handbook of Data Analysis, Me++: The Cyborg Self and the Networked City

Reviews: History of Regional Science and the Regional Science Association International: The Beginnings and Early History, Handbook of Data Analysis, Me++: The Cyborg Self and the Networked City

Review: ME++: The Cyborg Self and the Networked City

Review: ME++: The Cyborg Self and the Networked City

Cyborg: a Design for Life in the Borderlands

Traditional managers have insisted in a highly structured way of institutionalizing the mechanistic, functianalized, physical management of people and artifacts. This focus on structure creates a tension between the need for rigid command on the OM hand and that for flexible response to threats on the other. The modern worker i s thereby confronted with a bewildering multiplicity of partial identities, contradictory viewpoints and corporate strategies that pull in different directions. Wood suggests a contrasting approach, the cyborg self; a hybrid composition of organism and machine that celebrates the very tension that the structural approach abhors. The cyborg gives primacy to relationships us things in their own right ahead of individual terms and expressions. Thus, the cyborg stands in opposition to a focus on structure and is perhaps an introduction to the organization's postmodern focus on interactions and processes.

Bisexuals Making Out with Cyborgs: Politics, Pleasure, Con/fusion

This article considers the appeal of the figure of the cyborg for bisexuals, offering bisexual readings of both Donna Haraway's cyborg, and of the cyborg self created within text-based virtual reality. The writer argues that understanding bisexuality as part of a web of meanings and material realities can lead to a new political awareness, and suggests ways to make some of these connections. Through her analysis, she emphasises the role of technology in creating and developing contemporary bisexuality.

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

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...