information, embodiment, and cyborgs... oh my.
Okay, so as a break from working on a presentation while still trying to retain some semblance of productivity, I'm going to write a little bit about the aforementioned paper. Since I'm not very active on LJ except for obsessively checking the CalAZ community, I don't expect this to be of much interest. It's just an informal way for me to work through some pretty dense material and complex ideas. And if it turns out to be even marginally intriguing to anyone - bonus!
I'm working on a paper for my Environmental Lit & Media seminar (if this course title is of any interest to you, please feel free to check out our course blog) in which I'll be looking at female cyborgs in William Gibson's novel Neuromancer and Cherrie Moraga's play Heroes and Saints. Neuromancer is a pretty well-know novel within science/speculative fiction, specifically within the subgenre of cyberpunk. Written in the early 80s, Gibson essentially revolutionized the cyberpunk genre. He is the man responsible for coining the term 'cyberspace.' Much of the technology in this futuristic novel had yet to be conceptualized, much less developed and implemented in any meaningful way, prior to its publication. In fact, many of the scientists/programmers/developers/techies/whatever who went on to create these technologies credit Gibson and Neuromancer as their inspiration. I think this anecdote is a really cool little piece of info, especially since the sciences and the humanities don't usually play or share so nicely with one another. :) Moraga's play, on the other hand, is historically situated and very localized. Set in the San Joaquin Valley in 1988, Moraga bases her play on the activism of Cesar Chavez and his United Farm Workers (UFW) organization in the 80s, when Chavez led a boycott to protest the use of pesticides on grapes. The use of pesticides was contaminating the land, which caused a cancer cluster and an increase in birth defects in the area. Working from this context, Heroes and Saints is socially and politically aware and deals with issues of environmental racism, justice, and activism.
In addition to these two primary works, I'm reading a mindblowing theoretical text by N. Katherine Hayles entitled How We Became Posthuman. An eerie and alienating title, I know, but Hayles does this self-consciously. In this work, Hayles traces how information (as a concept, as a thing) has become divorced from materiality and enacted human experience. What she means by this is that we no longer think of information as having a tangible, material source. We rather conceive of information as a kind of free-floating, fluid thing, existing somewhere out there (in cyberspace, perhaps, which is just another free-floating concept that denies materiality) just waiting for us to send a signal in order to receive it as message. What she hopes to accomplish through this historicization of information's loss of physicality is an alignment with the liberal humanist concept of subjectivity, which we Westerners have relied on for a long time, and a concept she's attempting to debunk. The model of the liberal humanist subject privileges mind and consciousness over body and materiality. But, Hayles posits, how can we have consciousness without embodiment? The figure of the cyborg offers an interesting iteration of Hayles' ideas.
According to Donna Haraway in her seminal article "A Cyborg Manifesto," we are all cyborgs. Haraway means this in both literal and abstract ways. Literally, we are all human-machine hybrids. More importantly, however, we are all hybrids of lived fiction and reality. The cyborg's embodied hybridity rejects notions of essentialism by traversing the boundaries between such binaries as natural-artificial and mind-body. Thus, taken together, Hayles and Haraway provide a productive framework for exploring the female cyborg as a challenge to the liberal humanist subject while Neuromancer's Molly and Heroes and Saint's Cerezita, as female cyborg characters, offer intriguing complications to the very idea of how and where we locate body and mind.
I was hoping to get into Molly and Cerezita a little more, but alas, I'm sleepy and this is becoming longer than I imagined. I will probably write something on Molly very soon... If anyone read this far - you rock. I'll leave you with a cool image:
Rendition of Neuromancer's Molly
(neuromancer.org)