Cyborgs Wanted, No Humans Need Apply:
Recreating and Recoding Ourselves in a Digital World
Beat writer William S. Burroughs championed the use of the “cut-up” method in order to rediscover the meaning in language. In The Cut-Up Method of Brion Gysin, he suggests that words repeated continuously over a period of time may have become stale and as result, lost their meaning. However, a rearrangement of words changes both the content and the form of the original work. As cut-ups are an individualistic endeavor, a person with a pair of scissors and their own imagination as to how the words should be cut, “Cut-ups often come through as code messages with special meaning for the cutter (NMR 90).”
If this is the case, then every instance of a cut-up is based on the cutter’s own interpretation of reality and the reality of the words on a page. These so-called coded messages force the cutter and future readers to revaluate the meaning of the words. According to Burroughs, “The reader must piece [the story] together from flashes, obsessive phrases, and incomplete scene, struggling though disjointed chronology and abrupt changes of narrators, or cryptic cut-ups” (PAF 15).
Burroughs’ literature anticipated the importance of new technologies such as the Internet. His cut and paste techniques are suggestive of the revision and cross over made possible by media convergence. According to new media theorist Henry Jenkins, media convergence is the collision of old and new forms of media and it is the intersection of the media producer with media consumers. In Convergence Cultures: Where Old and New Media Collide, Jenkins explains convergence as the liminal space created by the “flow of content across media platforms” (2). However, an increasingly digitized society also lends itself to being more homogenous. Much like Jenkins’ Black Box fallacy, we have tried to meld cultures and beliefs together so as to create one overarching global culture to which everyone can relate and participate. Nevertheless, in highlighting the uniqueness of individual cultures and trying to bring them together as a single group, we have instead amassed them into an indistinguishable homogeneity.
How do we escape this technological determinism? Is the introduction of new technology impinging on our existence as autonomous individuals? Is there a “pure” creative self apart from technology’s influence? At this point, when no one can fathom life without checking their Facebook profile or their personalized iPod, the answer is a resounding “No”. Twenty-first century society is a nation of cyborgs, too much intertwined with technology to set ourselves apart from it.
What exactly is a cyborg? As proposed by Donna Haraway in A Cyborg Manifesto, “A cyborg is a cybernetic organism, a hybrid of machine and organism, a creature of social reality as well as a creature of fiction” (PAF 604). The cyborg is not only a model of what we are but is also a vision of what we must become.
Cyborg is a metaphorical term used to unpack ideas of the “–ism” society we have become: of racism, of feminism, of capitalism, and so on. Haraway seeks to erase the prescribed concepts we try to force upon society’s members, notions of what it means to be black/white, gay/straight, male/female. Not everyone fits into these neat paradigms and there is no binding characteristic which can encompass all individuals’ lived experiences. We are all cyborgs in that we are living in a post-categorical society in which no one fits broad essentialist groups created to more easily quantify who we are. What we are, in fact, is a society of cyborgs.
“People are nowhere near so fluid, being both material and opaque. Cyborgs are ether, quintessence” (PAF 607). Part of our intangible nature as cyborgs is our relationships in cyberspace. On the Internet, we create a myriad of connections to one another. However, we still manage to marginalize certain groups because of the nature of the system we currently operate in. Despite cyborgs’ existence in a space beyond gender, beyond race, and beyond socioeconomic class, the locus of power in Web 2.0 still seems to rests in the hands of wealthy white men. The minority Other exists in that we are hybrid organisms of animal and machine according to the same rules of years past. We cannot truly advance until the locus of power has shifted and we all have equal access to the same information and same opportunities. In order for this to occur, the rules must change. Haraway’s Cyborg Manifesto is more than calling attention to the way things have changed in lieu of technology. Furthermore, it is an examination of how society must still work towards change so as to perpetuate the survival of the cyborg and elimination of the marginalized Other.
“Writing is pre-eminently the technology of cyborgs…Cyborg politics is the struggle for language and the struggle against perfect communication, against the one code that translates all meaning perfectly, the central dogma of phallogocentrism” (PAF 618). Haraway suggests that in order for a new language to arise, we have to complicate the status quo. “The cyborg is a kind of disassembled and reassembled, postmodern collective and personal self” (PAF 611). Like Burroughs’ cut-ups, we too have to rearrange the pieces to rediscover the meaning of our words. What we have known has grown stale and obsolete. In its place, we must “translate the world into a problem of coding, a search for a common language in which all resistance to instrumental control disappears and all heterogeneity can be submitted to disassembly, reassembly, investment, and exchange” (PAF 611).
Works Cited
Geyh, Paula, Fred G. Leebron, and Andrew Levy. Postmodern American Fiction, A Norton Anthology.
Jenkins, Henry. Convergence Cultures, Where Old and New Media Collide.
Wardtrip-Fruin and Nick Monfort, eds. The New Media Reader.
