Summary-9

HUMAN

Outline in this class
Identity and cyborgs
–what is a cyborg?
a comparison of democratic, liberal politics; identity politics; biopolitics; and cyborg politics

The main topic in this class was relation between human and cyborg.
We can find cyborg on many S.F movies; the film make cyborg is like a human. And cyborg confused their identity.

biopolitics: politics carried out through the means, the techniques and technologies of health and illness, statistics, the census, epidemiology and demography, the science of race, eugenics, population, abortion, genomics, and new reproductive technologies.

Chimera: “identities” of mixtures & fusions
Definition of chimera (Oxford English Dictionary)
–Painting, Archicture: A grotesque monster formed of the parts of various animals.
–Literature: An unreal creature of the imagination
–Biology: An organism (commonly a plant) in which tissues of genetically different constitution co-exists as a result of grafting, mutation, or some other process.
This sculpture is one of the images of the mixtures.

Definition of cyborg
“A cyborg is a cybernetic organism, a hybrid machine and organism, a creature of social reality as well as a creature of fiction. ... By the late twentieth century, our time, a mythic time, we are all chimeras, theorized and fabricated hybrids of machine and organism; in short, we are cyborgs.”
a cyborg world: from one perspective
From one perspective, a cyborg world is about the final imposition of a grid of control on the planet, about the final abstraction embodied in a Star Wars apocalypse waged in the name of defense, about the final appropriation of women’s bodies in a masculinity orgy of war.
a cyborg world: from another perspective
From another perspective, a cyborg world might be about lived social and bodily realities in which people are not afraid of their joint kinship with animals and machines, not afraid of permanently partial identities and contradictory standpoints.

The “cyborg manifesto”
what is a manifesto?
–compare to the manifestos of art and politics (e.g., surrealism and marxism)

the breakdown of three dichotomies
-human/animal
-machine/organism
-physical/non-physical

“There is nothing about being “female” that naturally binds women.”
“No objects, spaces or bodies are sacred in themselves; any component can be interfaced with any other if the proper standard, the proper code, can be constructed for processing signals in a common language.”
“The cyborg is a kind of disassembled and reassembled, post-modern collective and personal self. This is the self feminists must code.”
(identity and performance / difference)