Our fundamental concern, according to Ollivier Dyens in the excerpt “The Rise of Cultural Bodies,” is our bodies. By looking at H.G. Wells’ The Island of Dr. Moreau and Franz Kafka’s The Metamorphosis, Dyens explores the cultural material that sew together the fabric of our concern, and how humanity is treated within them. 

“The twentieth century was, first and foremost, a body-century, one where living bodies (human as well as animal) were plasticized, modified, dismantled, and forced into different cultural molds and non-genetic framework.” (59)

Dyens compares the “suffering, mutilation and even torture” conceptual tools of Dr. Moreau and his scientific experiments with the insect-like transformation of George Samsa. The comparison is interesting especially since it highlights that cultural tensions do impact bodies and cultural material can create “plastic bodies” in place of genetics and identity. 

These stories, while indicative of real world concerns, are works of fiction. The fact that these short stories can be construed as the predications of Wells and Kafka about the future can not be ignored, but should we not take a moment right now to ask what our present reality actually looks like? 

A facial structure based on the golden ratio, 1:1.618, that culture values for its beauty.

Maybe human culture is the ultimate conundrum: as we constant fight to balance the value of the natural with the convenience and appeal of the plastic.  We, as a culture, are infatuated with physical beauty, yet we still hold citizens to certain moral standards. We also like make-up, plastic surgery and spy movies (the Bourne Identity franchise could be seen as a more current representation of our qualms about identity and Dollhouse implants personalities into the same bodies over and over again like a recycled container). We don’t transform our bodies (necessarily) for punishment, as in The Metamorphosis. And while some people push their bodies to the limits by extreme adventures and conditions (working out, Ironman triathlons, climbing Mount Everest), there are laws that prevent scientists from torturing ourselves out of our own bodies. 

But we, and our bodies, are inevitably impacted by culture and technology. Politicians and current events remind us of the things we need to fear and the things we need to celebrate. The persistent saturation of stick figure women in the media push people to get plastic  surgery for perfect faces, perfect butts, perfect hips and perfect breasts. Does this impact our identity, our biology, and our humanity? Because girls with bigger boobs have more confidence, does that mean plastic surgeons change their identities?

Right now, the answers are still painted in shades of grey, but literary warnings and cultural material about body and identity deserve their due attention, so that we don’t end up shrugging our perfectly-molded shoulders and saying “hindsight is 20/20.”

As a human being, however, I think she missed the point and I have to discuss it.

In order to make my point effectively, I have to break the order of the article. When Smith-Windsor writes:

“The making of cyborg bodies is simply panopticism, the ingestion of the statist technology. It is about exposure, about making visible each privacy of the human body for the purposes of controlling individual life.”

It is curious to think that this is how she views the medical care her child received and its impact on her life. Because I see the goal being saving her daughter’s life. 

“What happens when technology begins to work itself into the infantile discourse, severing the symbiosis between mother and child? What happens when the infant, instead becomes incapable of distinguishing between itself and the machine? These are the questions posed by the biological mother of a cyborg. This is the genesis of a cyborg. It begins in pre-literacy, when the child engages in an infantile language with the machine, and not, the mother.”

Smith-Windsor is making the assumption that technology becoming part of the infantile discourse is SEVERING the mother-child symbiosis. Does it have to be this way? can the technological side of the discourse not be complimentary and compatible to mother-child symbiosis. 

Later on in the article, she describes the horrific first experience of holding her baby for the first time. Not that holding her baby was horrific, but the circumstances in the nursery were. But I can’t help but think that this poor mother has missed the point. I think that the point is that she was there to hold her baby.   

“Love between humans, thus, becomes invested in a third party. What happens then, in cyborg culture, when that “third party” is not a person at all, but a machine — a ventilator, an incubator, a monitor.”

I sort of think that this is flawed logic. Isn’t technology already a third party? what about facebook, twitter, and myspace? what about social networking sites or dating websites like eharmony?? Doesn’t technology already mediate our lives and our relationships? If we were to go directly from what  Smith-Windsor is saying than one logical conclusion is that we are not physical but social cyborgs already. This is something that I personally cannot accept as completely true. In the philosophical triangle of identity (moi, soi, toi) only one of them — how you feel other people perceive you — is changed by technology. While it is a change, how much weight can we give it? Is not our humanity defined far beyond the restrictions, or in this case additions to, our physical selves? Without being an overly religious individual, this is something that I have to believe. I cannot let myself be defined by facebook, by my twitter followers, by the wire at the back of my teeth left over by my braces, or, I like to believe, by any prosthethis were I ever to need one. 

Aren’t human beings defined by the much less tangible? By the fact that all babies, even cyborg babies, smile, cry and discover their hands. By the fact that somewhere along the way we make friends, we get acquainted with heart racing love, and, even though we are no longer babies, we cry. Can machines change these beautiful things? I like to think not; I have to hope not.

I do think its important to explore what Haraway’s “A Manifesto for Cyborgs” (1985) is actually trying to say. So she’s not actually talking about robots. The whole cyborg thing is a metaphor for human beings, or just women, depending on how far you want to take the feminist angle. “We are all chimeras, theorized and fabricated hybrids of machine and organism; in short, we are cyborgs.”  It must also be pointed out that Haraway’s manifesto has been used as evidence in many, many theories that were not originally intended by the author.

If it takes a village to raise a child, then we are all made up of inconsistent elements, we are all individuals. We’ve all experienced not being understood and, without sounding like the pitch for a Disney teenie-bopper movie, we’ve all felt like outcasts at some point. Cyborgs are good, according to Haraway. 

A particular individual who considers himself an other (ie. not completely human) is Kevin Warwick. He is the University of Reading professor who, roughly, implanted computer chips in his arm in 1998 to open doors without touching them — think a garage door opener, but smaller and in your arm — and another one in 2002 so that he can try to communicate selectively and telepathically with his wife. His research, according to his website, is at the expense of him having a normal life and explores the possibility of enhancing human capabilities through the harness of machine abilities. And by the way, Warwick considers himself an actual cyborg.

So our first week of talking about cyborgs boils down to identity. How does being a human being make you a hybrid by default (Haraway)? And how does adding one or two tiny computer chips into your physical body make you less human?

Imagine, for a moment, having the mentality that when anything not organic is implanted in your body, you become less human. That means that everyone with a pacemaker or hearing aids have to start identifying as machines. A completely separate category if philosophy could develop. There are already loads of articles on how we identify with machines in society, but our thinking would most likely have to expand far beyond where it’s at right now. Kevin Warwick would be the first case study. 

Would our enhanced capabilities, adding steel and electrodes to our anatomy, affect the way we think of who we are? Warwick’s “I, Cyborg” states that “Humans sense the world in a restricted way, vision being the best of the sense. Humans understand the world in only 3 dimensions and communicate in a very slow, serial fashion called speech.” There is no doubt that Warwick’s vision of an implant enhanced human implies a new way of thinking of yourself.  Can we handle it?

Being a metaphorical cyborg is one thing, but being an actual cyborg is another, with another wide span of psychological and philosophical implications. I’m happy with my limited human capabilities and I’m okay with opening doors with my hands. 

So I’m going to go brush up on George Orwell’s “Politics and the English Language” and the last thing I wanted to say was that I really wanted to put up pictures of Warwick with this post, but you need permission to use any of the photos on his website. 

“Am I different? We all are, [...] but there is something kind of fantastic about that, isn’t there?.” The Fantastic Mr. Fox, trailer.

But what do films like eXistenZ say about our existence? (Pardon the play on words, but it had to be done).

Jennifer Jason Leigh’s character Allegra Geller points out in eXistenZ that her game is a game that “everybody’s already playing out.” While it may be suggested that she is simply referring to the popularity of her game, Allegra may also be talking about how truly her game imitates life — it is almost as though you would be play it anyways, whether or not you were plugged into the game. Lia M. Hotchkiss’ article ” ‘Still in the Game’: Cybertransformations of the ‘New Flesh’ in David Cronenberg’s eXistenZ,” also points out that the games explored in the many cyberpunk films often are “designed to mimic the frequent of uncertainties of life itself as an unfolding process.” I have come across people who would, instead of getting together and meeting with friends, be content to sit alone in their rooms and play games like Halo while communicating with their friends through the game online. Does that mean that video games have a rhythm and social order so true to life that they can replace it? 

Every once in a while, I have to force myself to stop and examine my surroundings. But this is a practice that I have to force. These science fiction, cyberpunk films like Videodrome, The Thirteenth Floor, The Matrix, and eXistenZ have a lot to say about technology, about the future, about reality, about identity, but I can’t help thinking: what does it say about us? These films present a clear need to evaluate our own state separate from the states of technology, virtual reality, etc, etc. “Our” reality can be separated into two categories: the individual reality and the societal reality. In both cases, the impact of video games and virtual reality cannot be ignored. Are we at a place where, if complete disembodiment were required for a virtual reality video game, we would be able to accept it as common place? Are we ready to jump into the depths of a “consensual hallucination that forms our sense of reality itself?” 

Perhaps these questions seem too far into the future to consider with seriousness, but if films cover the topic, cyberpunk novels live in it, and the technology is here (as in the fabulous videogame promotion of a racing game seen in class) or at least on the horizon, would it not make sense to broach with caution? 

Jude Law’s character Ted Pikul only did not play the game because he feared the process of having a gameport inserted into his back. Maybe he was secretly the smartest character in the film. He lives (although in a questionable reality) a fine life. Why do we (or the characters in eXistenZ) need to live the perfect mimic of real life? In my opinion, there is enough drama and conflict in everyday life to be quite content without an extra layer of cyber-reality to contend with, thank you very much.

Just as Jason Sperb describes Cronenberg’s Videodrome as a sci-fi/horror film “present[ing] us with a world where the copy has supplanted the original permanently in a state of simulation” (Sperb)) I can compare the lack of live action in Final Fantasy to being a horror of simulation in itself. 

Maybe it’s just because I, personally, am most inclined to come to the defense of human actors. But I can simply not equate tears in the eyes of Aki, the main female protagonist, to tears in eyes of Meryl Streep or Helen Mirren or Rachel McAdams. There is just a very human tugging at the heart strings that cannot be replicated by pixels, voice-over, and mimicking the movement. 

When I was watching Final Fantasy,  a single clause of Sperb’s article kept running through my mind: “Time pushes us out.” While Sperb is referring to the population being pushed through the different stages of postmodernity, the words themselves spoke to Final Fantasy, in my view, on a different level. Has new film technology pushed us out of the traditional filmic representation of ourselves? What happens to us if we start seeing machines instead of other humans in a representative position?

I don’t think, as Japanese roboticist Masahiro Mori said, that as a machine acquires greater similarity to a human it becomes more emotionally appealing to the observer. (class notes) In my own experience, the closer a machine comes to humanness, the more likely I am to recoil. It is as though there is an protective instinct that kicks into to remind me that what I am seeing is not real. Maybe it is because we need to preserve a certain level of self-understanding that cannot be reached by machines?

Also, there are some machines that on their own and looking very much like machines cause empathy in humans. Consider that the well-received film WALL-E could bring out emotion in an audience. While it may have had some human characteristics (like sad eyes), WALL-E was visually a machine. 

So maybe we have it backwards. In my mind, I hope we do. If machines stay machines and humans stay human, would we not manage to keep the human representations of ourselves, and still be able to appreciate the capacity of machines?

So I wasn’t surprised that the design of computers and the ideology behind an individual’s interaction with it could be connected to the stage. Theatre is an ancient tradition that can be found in almost every culture.

But I had a lot to learn from Lev Manovich’s “The Poetics of Augmented Space.”  What I came to focus on while I was reading is the idea that technology has evolved into being much less obtrusive than it was originally. Have you ever seen a picture of the first computers? They looked something like this: 

It really just wouldn't fit in your living room.

They were huge, and took more than one person to operate. As computers became more everyday, they were still very big and other technology as well would create clutter. Check out the world’s first mobile phone: 

Its the cellphone's version of clunker. But it was a major innovation in its day.

Isn’t it interesting that the more augmented the space we live in becomes, the less physical space the augmenting technology takes up? By not taken up as much space, the technology we are using everyday becomes much less noticeable to us. Someone out of the 1940s would be absolutely astounding by how many “records” (think 17 inch vinyl) can fit on the newest iPod shuffle, which is smaller than a house key. 

when does "small!" get too small?

At the beginning of his article, Manovich made three predictions about what was then the upcoming decade and is now the decade that is oh so quickly coming to a close. They were the increase and public use of video surveillance (check), data such as the internet and GPS being available through cellphones (check, and thank you blackberry), and large, thin video displays becoming more pervasive in both private and public space (check). That’s 3 for 3, and if Manovich in 2002 could make accurate prediction of technological developments this decade, what could he tell us about the upcoming one?

The influence of architecture and art on technological design is interesting, but is truly captivating, in my mind, is that the imaginative fixation in the 1980s on virtual reality could have gone so awry in the present, and come out so much more practical for human living. 

However, “mind over matter” has its consequences. Robots in science fictions are getting more and more human like. Or is it that humans are getting more and more robot like? 

In Mischa Peters’ “Exit Meat,” Peters categorizes four different types of digital body in science fiction literature: the natural body, the modified body, the enhanced body, the cyber body. The cyber body, the most extreme is defined as “no longer making the distinction between beings of flesh and blood versus beings made of or mediated by technology.” (Peters, 56) Doesn’t that perfectly describe Joe and Jessica’s situation in Screamers? 

The big picture of how we relate to other human beings is changing and it is pushing towards not being able to tell the difference between a human and a machine. But upon reflection, I think there is another hypothesis to contend with: the impact the growing trend of humans not noticing each other.

Thursday I was on a bus. Completely in my own little reality, I had my ipod plugged in my ears and was playing a game on my cellphone. I was entertained, contented to ride in silence. I didn’t look anyone in the eye, I didn’t smile at anyone, and I certainly didn’t say hello to anyone. It took the bus getting into a collision with a car in the middle of an intersection for me to even acknowledge the girl my age sitting in front of me. Afterwards, both going in the same direction, we walked downtown together, talking. I never would have done that without the collision. What type of person does that make me? I think it makes me normal. How many people say hello? How many people notice people? 

So, isn’t the loss of our physicality partly our fault? We are the ones who buy into everything tech companies sell us. Wouldn’t it be just wonderful for our arms to work better? For our brains to learn faster? To listen to the most music on the smallest device available for the longest amount of time? Anybody could make that sales pitch and almost anybody would buy it. And each of these things makes us less dependent on each other. And if we don’t pay attention, how are we ever going to be able to keep our bodies? Or even just to understand them within a technological context. 

It’s really frustrating to read “Exit Meat,” because instead of intellectualizing what is happening to our bodies (which does, don’t get me wrong, have its merits) don’t we need to be asking questions about what drives us? Why this technology is so appealing? When did we stop asking each other questions; when did it start being socially acceptable to ignore people? Do we fix it? If so, how?

Enter anxiety over the loss of our historical agency. It may not have happened yet, but we do, according to Stanley Aronowitz’s “Technology and the Future of Work,”  have reason to be concerned.

As human beings, are we losing our context? “[the introduction of computers in the workplace] manage to elide the panopticon of power only by ‘forgetting’ the context within which computer mediated-work is done.” (134) 

While the idealist view of the lose of history has mostly tapered out in the ebb and flow of popular academic argument, Aronowitz does maintain that “they nevertheless retain much more than a marginal existence among important sectors of Western intellectuals.” (134)  

This fear of cultural amnesia is also prevalent in literature and film. Take for example, “Red Mars” a chapter excerpt from Kim Stanley Robinson’s The Crucible. Nadia, the main character, is completely relatable. She is logical, descriptive, and could be any modern day human being. But her thoughts and observations are hindered by her memory lapses from life on Earth. Any discussion of Earth is almost immediately followed by “as far as she can remember.” It should also be noted that while Nadia does adapt fairly quickly to her life on Mars, she is, of course, completely dependent on technology to survive (her EVA suit, Martian bulldozers, etc.).  Could Nadia be foreshadowing what our future might look like?

Technological dependence also brings about (it would seem) a shift in the way we look at ourselves. David Bell brings up the idea of performative identity in his article “Identities in Cyberculture,” and almost everyone you meet will agree that they behave differently when they know that they are on camera. But much more subtle shifts of identity are happening without a general awareness. 

As Aronowitz so aptly puts it: “The merger of the intellect with technology signals the demise of the ancient naysayer.” (133) Philosophical questions about who we are within the implications of technological dependence are being laughed off by postmodernists as irrelevant. 

But what is happening right now? Does the very fact that Aronowitz brings up these points within his article negate the alleged affects of technology in our lives? Furthermore, can human beings be satisfied with technology and letting all labour be done by machines? Are we anatomically able to let go of our physical potential in place of technology? 

This is where a particular point in Ex Machina is extraordinarily enlightening. While the new mayor, with his super human ability to control technology can defend himself, the police chief refuses to let him. She absolutely insists that her cops should be allowed to do their jobs even though the mayor can do it faster and more easily. She knows better than to let her police force feel inadequate and obsolete. 

Don’t we, like the fictional characters in Ex Machina, need to be doing something?

First, however, I feel I should discuss Surrogates. Once you got over Bruce Willis’ terrible, terrible hairpiece (which, to the relief of everyone, disappeared about twenty minutes in), the movie was interesting in its presentation, if more than  little unrealistic. The most frustrating thing I found was that the robots did nothing wrong. They did not (as in most Hollywood plots) revolt against humans or suppress humans in anyway. It was the humans themselves who chose to suppress themselves, for fear (?) that the real world was too dangerous for their precious, vulnerable bodies. And the situation that instigated the major pure human revolt was very unclear. It seemed like the humans were constantly on the verge of revolt, guided by their prophet-like leader. The humans who lived without a surrogate simply did so because they believed in it and they saw surrogates as a detriment rather than an aid. But there were no distinct qualities that made the surrogates evil, or antagonized them in any way.

The second thing that I found frustrating about the movie was more minor, but still a gap in logic. The murder rate of zero would just never happen in real life. Think about the situation that humans put themselves in while plugged into a surrogate. They were not aware of their surroundings and therefore completely defenseless. Isn’t it possible that some enraged human would think to send his surrogate to kill a human while they are lying in their chair attached to their surrogate? Yeah, I think so too. It doesn’t help that this actually happens to Agent Peters halfway through the film. 

 But the film did bring up, in a rather backwards way, some interesting points about humans and the consequences of disembodiment, also discussed in Balsamo’s article. Through Bruce Willis’ character, the film explores the numbness (which is the only appropriate word I can think to use to describe it) that happens when too much time is spent attached to a machine. However, the main difference between the article (and Lawnmower Man) and Surrogates is that it is the vast majority of the human population who are techno-dependent. Balsamo captures the mood of the time in this passage: “[...] the Village Voice called the cyberspace artists and hackers ‘gonzo techno-hippies.’ Indeed the juxtaposition of countercultural rhetoric with technological elitism constructs an interesting stage of the promotion of virtual reality technologies.” Surrogates  flips this concept on its head by having people who are going against technology portrayed as hippies, almost indicating a cyclical path of history. 

Balsamo also talks about the marketing of technology which is similar to the marketing of technology in the film (although, the film takes it a bit further by making having a surrogate a matter of personal safety): “They also draw our attention to the process by which [virtual reality] technologies are transformed into commodities, through the engagement between people and products.”

Furthermore, Balsamo describes almost exactly (and much more succinctly than Bruce) what the human characters are going through in Surrogates. “This conceptual denial of the body is accomplished through the material repression of the physical body.”

My last thought is two fold: 1) will the “demonology” of technology described by Balsamo, and seen in both Lawnmower Man  and Surrogates ever go away? and 2) is it actually a good thing if it does?

The other point I wanted to comment on was brought up in class. I, too, feel that the reading was not as relevant. However, I would like to suggest that this in itself is an insight into how human beings are handling and interacting with convergence culture. In one way, we are even more immersed in it. Journalists can take a photo and enhance the colours, which although simple and a small detail, still takes the photo further away from the “real.” This happens at such a frequent rate that it does not even register with most people. However, our embrace of new technology has in a lesser way, made us more aware. Photo editing, to stick with the one example, is much less specialized and people download software to do it on their own computers. Therefore, they are aware of the possible photo manipulations on the market. 

As a final thought, the School of Studies in Art and Culture makes their students potentially more aware of the visual culture. But for everyone else, will technology ever slow down? Or is it possible that popular knowledge will ever catch to technological possibilities?