A New Alphabet ~ Commentary C 2

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Cyborg                                                                                          

Rodin, Auguste. Statue, Striding Man. 1878.
Giacometti, Alberto. Statue, Walking Man. 1960.
Quoted Text:
Haraway, Donna. The Cyborg Manifesto. 2000.
 

 

Rodin’s Striding Man, a classic expression of the human form is paired with Giacometti’s surrealistic rendition of a Walking Man. Both images are elongated and skewed in this page design. An excerpt from Donna Haraway’s Cyborg Manifesto is printed over Rodin’s statue, contrasting the classical with the postmodern.

Haraway initiated a new branch of third-wave feminism, calling for liberation from the limits of uniform self-definitions. She discounted both biologic and culture constructions, and her radical stance embraces cyber-enhanced human potentialities. Some of these ideas are coherent with the Extropians, a society of technophiles, hoping to increase life expectancy through cryonics, robotics, bionics and other means.

Haraway’s cyborg feminism seeks liberation from limiting constructions of the social self. A similar study, Writing on the Body: On Female Embodiment and Feminist Theory by editors Katie Conboy, Nadia Medina, and Sarah Stanbury, considers how lived body experience conflicts with social constructions. Cyborg theory intersects and merges with theories of embodiment by proposing new definitions of human. Using metaphors from mechanics, biometrics, engineering and systems, Haraway reconstitutes the human organism.

Informatics, the study of information organisms is an emerging science that participates in topics related to cyborg-feminist theory. Informatics uses mapping techniques to track and deconstruct information networks. The webzine, CTHEORY, in Article 63-Bioinformatics Part 2 (Oct. 28, 1998), postulates that the body is disappearing, in a type of negation by abstraction:

The difficulty with all of this is that the abstractness of the relation of molecular biology and informatics to some notion of "the body" has become so tenuous that one is tempted to suggest the disappearance of that cultural-material construct the body in the face of these developing technosciences.

Informatics introduces another permutation in the theories of embodied text, by discovering in medical records a new embodied representation of the human. Through ERCT charts, sonograms and laboratory specimens, the body as lived experience disappears. However, in the mapped graphical documents and their interpretive reading, the human body is reconstituted.   

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© Copyright 2002. All rights reserved. Contact: Jeanie S. Dean. Updated: 01/18/04