QUESTION 3: "The Machine/organism relationships are obsolete, unnecessary" writes Haraway. In what ways have our relations to machines been theorised?
"Critical thinking - the intellectually disciplined process of actively and skilfully conceptualising, applying, analysing, synthesising and/or evaluating information gathered from, or generalised by, observation, experience, reflection, reasoning or communication, as a guide to belief or action [or argument]".[1]
1. Deutsch, Karl: “Mechanism, Organism, and Society: Some Models in Natural and Social Science”
Deutsch’s traditionalist and definitional article utilises classical epistemologies and argumentation; borne of normative dichotomies dictating the relatively discrete realms of machines, organisms and society, on the basis of “humanistic values, consciousness, will and autonomy” [2]. Published in the Chicago Journal for the Philosophy of Science Association in 1951 during his second Political Science PhD at Harvard, Czechoslovakian social and political scientist Karl Deutsch gives definitional credibility to normative and necessary binaries of machine/organism as a means of anthropological investigation of society and communicative practices. It hence provides definitional assistance and contextual understanding of the “Classical model of Mechanism” and the “Classical concept of Organism” [3], from which we may form post-structural critiques to inform a more contemporary approach. However, without dynamic tools of post-structuralist understanding, the piece - though perhaps once academically authoritative - best serves as a historical conflation of classical and normative epistemological presentations of emerging techno-humanistic relationships.
Accordingly, a gendered inclusivity and discursive posthuman understanding in the modern age of information technology and electronic communication better traces the profusion of countervailing underpinnings of the cyborgian/human divide that perhaps weren’t within contemplation or even comprehension in 1951. Hence, despite its tenacity, evolving post-modernist critical approaches - while somewhat assisted by definitional ‘necessaries’ established by traditionalists - better embody the progressive and paradoxical limitations and possibilities of such distinctions and our relations with machines.
2. Herzogenrath, Bernd: “The Question Concerning Humanity: Obsolete Bodies and (Post) Digital Flesh”
This article posits a mediated counterpoint to normative distinctions between the humanistic organism and Freud’s "prosthetic God". Accordingly, literary commentator and communications theorist Bernd Herzogenrath investigates the “philosophical and psycho-pathological space” [4] of discursive inquiries into the posthuman body. Self-described as a “refereed journal devoted to contemporary theories of rhetoric, writing and culture,”[5] the aptly-named Enculturation academic journal features this article, setting out to investigate the possibilities and limitations of normative cultural rhetoric. Moreover, while the University of South Carolina published them, Herzogenrath’s Euro-centric philosophies and methods heavily underpin his own European technological understandings which are deeply rooted in Heidegger’s belief in humanity’s enframing of man and the Lacanian subject’s “staging [of] the real body within and as animated by a machine”.[6]
His linked biography canvasses culturally diverse scholarly credentials that embody his progressivism, as well as the credible legitimacy and global agency of both the journal and the author. Furthermore, Herzogenrath’s diverse post-structuralist arguments are underpinnined by a diverse array of American and European academia, providing a dynamic and qualitative historiographic reconfiguration of the epistemological limitations and possibilities of the “human-technology...primordial synthesis.”[7]
Benefiting from Deleuzeian conceptualisations of “body/technology assemblages”[8], Currier’s posthuman canvassing of the relevance of organism/machine distinctions is inherently ubiquitous in its transcendence of human/machine, human/animal and mind/body demarcations. Denouncing the denaturalizing of cyborg bodies as technophobic oppression, the article canvasses issues of identity and marginalisation of others and ourselves intrinsic in the negation of the “machine”. Published by SAGE’s Feminist Theory, an international interdisciplinary journal, the publication’s theoretical pluralism manifests itself in a bricolage of philosophical, gender, cultural and communication studies scholarship.
Geographically and temporally, cybertheorist Diane Currier embodies modern Western ideologues both from her Columbian University-locality and education, as well as the convergent Euro-centricity of her continual references to Freud, Deleuze and Guattari’s principles. Numerous citations substantiate countervailing paradoxes and the article’s reflections – specifically those relating to Haraway’s Manifesto and its hybridisation motif – provide pertinent and dynamic elucidations of nuanced gender influences on the present topic. Currier hence presents a highly structured postmodern configuration with transgressive linkages of feminism, bio-technological inclusivity and the emancipatory potentials intrinsic in the fluidity of paradoxically necessary and unnecessary organism/machine distinctions.
4. Manoj, V.R.: “Cybofree – Cyborgs, Fantasy, Reality, Ethics and Education”
Enunciating both inter-cultural and bio-ethical perspectives on the relationships between organisms and machines, Manoj’s article conceives the “cyborgation” as a “means that the natural body is becoming part machine”.[9] The relevance of this alternative perspective, both in its scientific and socio-political offerings, is further manifest in its elicitation of the possibilities and limitations, not only of the static binaries in traditionalist notions ala Deutsch, but of science itself. Accordingly, the dynamic melting pot of discourses seen in this article, published by a Japanese-based Journal of Asian and International Bioethics, indeed enlists the authoritativeness of modern scientific and Asian discourses as cited in its bibliography. Additionally, its Eastern sensibilities laud the artistry of the human form in juxtaposition with bio-ethical canvassing of dilemmas continually arising in the practice of medicine; partially contrasting previous articles in its re-enforcing the need for epistemological models to make machine/organism distinctions so that we may better understand their dynamic similarities and differences.
We hence glean an increasingly holistic view of the need for post-structuralist perspectives on the present topic, as “science can’t produce ideas by which we could live.” [10] Proposing the term “CYBOFREE” as best characterising the freedoms for fantasy and creation inherent in cyber-technologies, we hence see the relevance of definitional construction, paradoxically, as a means of emancipating the dual potentialities of machines and organisms.
5. Farnell, Ross: “In Dialogue with 'Posthuman’ Bodies: Interview with Stelarc”
A remaining perspective to complete the qualitative research requisite for post-positivist arguments on the transcendent and socio-political nature of the organism and the machine, is that of artistic mediation. UK Social Scientist Ross Farnell has presented, in his discussions with Australian performance artist Stelarc published in the UK journal Body & Society, this dynamic perspective; mediating between “the varying discourses of cultural and social theory” and “science and the tropes and images of science fiction”.[11] Hence, our discussion of posthuman tropes and the methods and manner in which Eastern and Western ideologues configure gender, identity, humanness and science, may be seen to culminate in Stelarc’s self-repudiating translation of theoretical, cultural and narrative models of the posthuman performative parameters of corporeal actualisation. Furthermore, while still fundamentally Euro-centric, the infused English/Australian perspectival shift perhaps adds a concurrent locality and universality.
Seemingly supportive of Haraway’s progressive subversion of discrete bodily distinctions in favour of a self- reflexive recognition of the humanistic machine, Stelarc extrapolates Marshall McLuhan’s notions of technology as an extension of organisms’ bodies whereby their fluidity and inexorable reductiveness may subvert their commoditisation and the elitism of access.[12] In this final performative image however, we at once see a kinetic aberration of the visceral paradoxes of possibility and impossibility not only of classificatory approaches to organisms and machines, but the impotence of our own epistemological and linguistic modes of expressing such complications.
"Critical thinking - the intellectually disciplined process of actively and skilfully conceptualising, applying, analysing, synthesising and/or evaluating information gathered from, or generalised by, observation, experience, reflection, reasoning or communication, as a guide to belief or action [or argument]".[1]
1. Deutsch, Karl: “Mechanism, Organism, and Society: Some Models in Natural and Social Science”
Deutsch’s traditionalist and definitional article utilises classical epistemologies and argumentation; borne of normative dichotomies dictating the relatively discrete realms of machines, organisms and society, on the basis of “humanistic values, consciousness, will and autonomy” [2]. Published in the Chicago Journal for the Philosophy of Science Association in 1951 during his second Political Science PhD at Harvard, Czechoslovakian social and political scientist Karl Deutsch gives definitional credibility to normative and necessary binaries of machine/organism as a means of anthropological investigation of society and communicative practices. It hence provides definitional assistance and contextual understanding of the “Classical model of Mechanism” and the “Classical concept of Organism” [3], from which we may form post-structural critiques to inform a more contemporary approach. However, without dynamic tools of post-structuralist understanding, the piece - though perhaps once academically authoritative - best serves as a historical conflation of classical and normative epistemological presentations of emerging techno-humanistic relationships.
Accordingly, a gendered inclusivity and discursive posthuman understanding in the modern age of information technology and electronic communication better traces the profusion of countervailing underpinnings of the cyborgian/human divide that perhaps weren’t within contemplation or even comprehension in 1951. Hence, despite its tenacity, evolving post-modernist critical approaches - while somewhat assisted by definitional ‘necessaries’ established by traditionalists - better embody the progressive and paradoxical limitations and possibilities of such distinctions and our relations with machines.
2. Herzogenrath, Bernd: “The Question Concerning Humanity: Obsolete Bodies and (Post) Digital Flesh”
This article posits a mediated counterpoint to normative distinctions between the humanistic organism and Freud’s "prosthetic God". Accordingly, literary commentator and communications theorist Bernd Herzogenrath investigates the “philosophical and psycho-pathological space” [4] of discursive inquiries into the posthuman body. Self-described as a “refereed journal devoted to contemporary theories of rhetoric, writing and culture,”[5] the aptly-named Enculturation academic journal features this article, setting out to investigate the possibilities and limitations of normative cultural rhetoric. Moreover, while the University of South Carolina published them, Herzogenrath’s Euro-centric philosophies and methods heavily underpin his own European technological understandings which are deeply rooted in Heidegger’s belief in humanity’s enframing of man and the Lacanian subject’s “staging [of] the real body within and as animated by a machine”.[6]
His linked biography canvasses culturally diverse scholarly credentials that embody his progressivism, as well as the credible legitimacy and global agency of both the journal and the author. Furthermore, Herzogenrath’s diverse post-structuralist arguments are underpinnined by a diverse array of American and European academia, providing a dynamic and qualitative historiographic reconfiguration of the epistemological limitations and possibilities of the “human-technology...primordial synthesis.”[7]
3. Currier, Dianne: “Feminist Technological Futures: Deleuze and Body/ Technology Assemblages”
Benefiting from Deleuzeian conceptualisations of “body/technology assemblages”[8], Currier’s posthuman canvassing of the relevance of organism/machine distinctions is inherently ubiquitous in its transcendence of human/machine, human/animal and mind/body demarcations. Denouncing the denaturalizing of cyborg bodies as technophobic oppression, the article canvasses issues of identity and marginalisation of others and ourselves intrinsic in the negation of the “machine”. Published by SAGE’s Feminist Theory, an international interdisciplinary journal, the publication’s theoretical pluralism manifests itself in a bricolage of philosophical, gender, cultural and communication studies scholarship.
Geographically and temporally, cybertheorist Diane Currier embodies modern Western ideologues both from her Columbian University-locality and education, as well as the convergent Euro-centricity of her continual references to Freud, Deleuze and Guattari’s principles. Numerous citations substantiate countervailing paradoxes and the article’s reflections – specifically those relating to Haraway’s Manifesto and its hybridisation motif – provide pertinent and dynamic elucidations of nuanced gender influences on the present topic. Currier hence presents a highly structured postmodern configuration with transgressive linkages of feminism, bio-technological inclusivity and the emancipatory potentials intrinsic in the fluidity of paradoxically necessary and unnecessary organism/machine distinctions.
4. Manoj, V.R.: “Cybofree – Cyborgs, Fantasy, Reality, Ethics and Education”
Enunciating both inter-cultural and bio-ethical perspectives on the relationships between organisms and machines, Manoj’s article conceives the “cyborgation” as a “means that the natural body is becoming part machine”.[9] The relevance of this alternative perspective, both in its scientific and socio-political offerings, is further manifest in its elicitation of the possibilities and limitations, not only of the static binaries in traditionalist notions ala Deutsch, but of science itself. Accordingly, the dynamic melting pot of discourses seen in this article, published by a Japanese-based Journal of Asian and International Bioethics, indeed enlists the authoritativeness of modern scientific and Asian discourses as cited in its bibliography. Additionally, its Eastern sensibilities laud the artistry of the human form in juxtaposition with bio-ethical canvassing of dilemmas continually arising in the practice of medicine; partially contrasting previous articles in its re-enforcing the need for epistemological models to make machine/organism distinctions so that we may better understand their dynamic similarities and differences.
We hence glean an increasingly holistic view of the need for post-structuralist perspectives on the present topic, as “science can’t produce ideas by which we could live.” [10] Proposing the term “CYBOFREE” as best characterising the freedoms for fantasy and creation inherent in cyber-technologies, we hence see the relevance of definitional construction, paradoxically, as a means of emancipating the dual potentialities of machines and organisms.
5. Farnell, Ross: “In Dialogue with 'Posthuman’ Bodies: Interview with Stelarc”
A remaining perspective to complete the qualitative research requisite for post-positivist arguments on the transcendent and socio-political nature of the organism and the machine, is that of artistic mediation. UK Social Scientist Ross Farnell has presented, in his discussions with Australian performance artist Stelarc published in the UK journal Body & Society, this dynamic perspective; mediating between “the varying discourses of cultural and social theory” and “science and the tropes and images of science fiction”.[11] Hence, our discussion of posthuman tropes and the methods and manner in which Eastern and Western ideologues configure gender, identity, humanness and science, may be seen to culminate in Stelarc’s self-repudiating translation of theoretical, cultural and narrative models of the posthuman performative parameters of corporeal actualisation. Furthermore, while still fundamentally Euro-centric, the infused English/Australian perspectival shift perhaps adds a concurrent locality and universality.
Seemingly supportive of Haraway’s progressive subversion of discrete bodily distinctions in favour of a self- reflexive recognition of the humanistic machine, Stelarc extrapolates Marshall McLuhan’s notions of technology as an extension of organisms’ bodies whereby their fluidity and inexorable reductiveness may subvert their commoditisation and the elitism of access.[12] In this final performative image however, we at once see a kinetic aberration of the visceral paradoxes of possibility and impossibility not only of classificatory approaches to organisms and machines, but the impotence of our own epistemological and linguistic modes of expressing such complications.
Footnotes:
[1] K Petress (2004). “Critical thinking: An extended definition” 124(3), 461.
[2] Karl Deutsch (2000). “Mechanism, Organism, and Society: Some Models in Natural and Social Science", (South Carolina: USC), p. 248.
[3] Deutsch, p. 234-237.
[4] Bernd Herzogenrath (2000). “The Question Concerning Humanity: Obsolete Bodies and (Post) Digital Flesh”, Enculturation 3(1), 1.
[5] Department of English, University of South Carolina (accessed 02/09/10).
[6] Herzogenrath, p. 4.
[7] Herzogenrath, p. 1.
[8] Dianne Currier (2003). “Feminist Technological Futures: Deleuze and Body/Technology Assemblages”, Feminist Theory 4(3), 325-329.
[9] V.R. Manoj (2001). “Cybofree – Cyborgs, Fantasy, Reality, Ethics and Education”, Eubios Journal of Asian and International Bioethics 11(6), 183.
[10] Manoj, p. 183.
[11] Ross Farnell (1999) “In Dialogue with 'Posthuman’ Bodies: Interview with Stelarc”, Body & Society 5(129), 129.
[12] Farnell, pp. 145-146.
WEBLIOGRAPHY
1. Currier, Dianne (2003). “Feminist Technological Futures: Deleuze and Body/Technology Assemblages” Feminist Theory, 4(3), http://fty.sagepub.com/content/4/3/321.full.pdf+html (accessed 1 September 2010).
2. Deutsch, Karl (1951). “Mechanism, Organism, and Society: Some Models in Natural and Social Science” South Carolina: USC,
http://www.jstor.org/stable/pdfplus/185706.pdf (accessed 29 August 2010).
3. Farnell, Ross, “In Dialogue with ‘Posthuman’ Bodies: Interview with Stelarc”, in Body Modification, ed. Mike Featherstone (London: Sage, 2000), pp. 129-147,
3. Farnell, Ross, “In Dialogue with ‘Posthuman’ Bodies: Interview with Stelarc”, in Body Modification, ed. Mike Featherstone (London: Sage, 2000), pp. 129-147,
http://books.google.com.au/books?id=EYl5bX_TB00C&printse (accessed 31 August 2010).
4. Herzogenrath, Bernd (2000). “The Question Concerning Humanity: Obsolete Bodies and (Post) Digital Flesh” Enculturation 3(1),
5. Manoj, V.R. (2001). “Cybofree – Cyborgs, Fantasy, Reality, Ethics and Education” Eubios Journal of Asian and International Bioethics 11(6),
Additional resource used solely for this Webliography:
• Petress, K (2004). “Critical thinking: An extended definition”, 124(3).
(Article originally published Body and Society 5 [1999], 129-147).
4. Herzogenrath, Bernd (2000). “The Question Concerning Humanity: Obsolete Bodies and (Post) Digital Flesh” Enculturation 3(1),
5. Manoj, V.R. (2001). “Cybofree – Cyborgs, Fantasy, Reality, Ethics and Education” Eubios Journal of Asian and International Bioethics 11(6),
http://ieet.org/index.php/IEET/more/manoj20011108/ (accessed 1 September 2010).
Additional resource used solely for this Webliography:
• Petress, K (2004). “Critical thinking: An extended definition”, 124(3).
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