1. Technologies of beauty
Bodies + Machines:
Technologies of beauty
Technologies of health: women and medical technology; technologies of reproduction

2. Cyborg, as used for example by Donna Haraway (1991) and Adele Clarke (1998), means the intermingling of people, things (including information technologies), representations, and politics in a way that challenges both the romance of essentialism and the hype about what is technologically possible. It acknowledges the interdependence of people and things, and it shows just how blurry the boundaries between them have become.
(Bowker & Star, 1999)

3. Cyborg Representations: Origins
Ancient Greece in B.C. (Deus ex machina)
1800's ("Ghost" in the machine)
Late 1900's (Miniaturization is about power)
Present: Machines are everywhere and they are invisible

4. Cyborg
As the information systems of the world expand and flow into each other, and more people use them for more different things, it becomes harder to hold to pure or universal ideas about representation or information, about identity
Representations of monsters / hybrids are a reflection of that experience of (ruptured) identity (imagined cyborgs in art and fiction, popular culture)
Real cyborgs (technologies of health, beauty ...)

5. Cyborg Picture of possible unity
Framework is rearrangement of social relations related to science & technology
Current movement from organic, industrial society to a polymorphous, information society

6. Analyses of Cyborg
AAA annual meetings: cyborg anthropology sessions (mid-1990s+)
Cyborg Handbook (Gray 1995)
The Cyborg Manifesto (Haraway 1985, 1991)
historical images of cyborgs emerge at times of intense change that involve thinking of how humanity is impacted by technology (Gonzáles 1999)

7. ‘Cyborg’
Source: [accessed Sept. 25, 2002] courtesy of Sarah Oelker

8. ‘Cyborg’
Source: google search for ‘cyborg’ [accessed Sept. 25, 2002] courtesy of Sarah Oelker

9. Cyborg Representations
Grotesque images that involve imagining the relationships bw people and things that are interpenetrated
Bad science fiction or crucial notion for understanding technoscience, and how the knowledge (of science and technology) is shaping lived experience

10. Source: google search for ‘cyborg’ [accessed Sept
Source: google search for ‘cyborg’ [accessed Sept. 25, 2002] courtesy of Sarah Oelker

11. ‘Cyborg’
Source: google search for ‘cyborg’ [accessed Sept. 25, 2002] courtesy of Sarah Oelker

12. ‘Cyborg’
Source: google search for ‘cyborg’ [accessed Sept. 25, 2002] courtesy of Sarah Oelker

13. cyborg representations -- hybrid identities
(go)

14. Cyborg Representations
List the organic (human) and inorganic (technological) characteristics of cyborgs you encountered.
What was your response to these ‘beings’?
Are they monsters, hybrids?
What are they not?

15. Cyborg Representations: Gonzáles
Organic cyborg (monster of multiple species)
Mechanical cyborg (techno-human amalgamation)
Cyborg consciousness (abstract, amalgamated, hybrid)
Cyborg body politics? -- Gendered cyborg? (social control over woman’s/man’s body)
Why are robots not cyborgs?
pre-industrial, industrial, post-industrial cyborg

16. Cyborg Representations
The notion of purity based on membership in a single, pristine racial, sexual, or even religious group does not hold in the ‘borderlands’ (the margins) that is populated by cyborgs
Cyborgs are the iconography of modern experience (not natural, but mediated through technology)
Why do they reflect a process of rethinking human nature? (use examples from your own search)

17. pre-industrial
industrial
post-industrial

18. autonomous automaton simulacrum Realism (representation)
Simulacrum = imitation, copy, resemblance, quasi, surrogate, contrived image

19. Microbiology, tuberculosis Organic division of labour Sex Labour Mind
“The dichotomies that reflect a shift from the comfortable old hierarchical domination to the new networks I call the informatics of domination” (Haraway, A Cyborg Manifesto (1991), 161
Representation
Eugenics
Hygiene
Microbiology, tuberculosis
Organic division of labour
Sex
Labour
Mind
Racial chain of being
White Capitalist Patriarchy
Simulation
Population control
Stress management
Immunology, AIDS
Ergonomics /cybernetics of labor
Genetic Engineering
Robotics
Artificial Intelligence
Neo-imperialism, United Nations humanism
Informatics of Domination
For Haraway, the hierarchical domination of the industrial age, is supplanted by the informatics of domination of the post-industrial age. In terms of historical framework, the industrial age spans the end of the World War II to find its expression in Star Wars.
Simulation refers to artificial, contrived activities.

20. Cyborg Representations: Gonzáles
Cyborg images appear when the current model of a human being does not fit a new paradigm -- a hybrid model of existence is required to encompass a new, complex and contradictory lived experience -- the cyborg body becomes the historical record of change in human perception in the realm of fantasy
How is the cyborg body reflecting modern experience in each of the cases that are discussed by González?
What is the habitat of each of these beings?

21. Cyborg Representations: Gonzáles
Mechanical Mistress: L’Horlogère (18th century engraving: body of a woman merged with an automaton) pre-industrial consciousness
ideology of order, precision, and mechanisation
infusion of technology into human lives (automatons; optical devices; devices for measuring time)
the precision of mechanical clock; system, regimentation is an ideal of mechanized identity that culminated in 19th century large-scale industrial production

22. Cyborg Representations: Gonzáles
19th century preoccupation with mechanization and possibility that people’s identities and emotional lives become like machines
automaton: servant, toy, master?
increasing regimentation of life, and human experience
control of population: statistics, censuses
power relations (class distinctions: gentleman / worker)

23. Cyborg Representations: Gonzáles
Hannah Höch: Das schöne Mädchen (1920) collage
early 20th century experience of modernism: a body in pieces
allegory of modernization (chaotic vision of the rapid social and cultural change after WWI; industrial growth; iconography of mass culture)
The figure of a woman reflects the experience of a ‘modern’ woman (emancipated? subjugated? consumerized? empowered? commodity? customer?)

24. Cyborg Representations: Gonzáles
Raoul Hausmann: Tête Méchanique. L’ésprit de notre temps (ca. 1921) assemblage of found objects
early 20th century experience of modernism: a mechanical mind
cerebral concept of the modern experience; representation of what has been displaced
a new being for a new age (humanity is insufficient) needs a body imagined in terms of contradictions

25. Cyborg Representations: Gonzáles
Phoenix Technologies Ltd. advertisement for Eclipse Fax (1993)
late 20th century experience of modernism: a gendered body of a futuristic Medusa (head of wires, blinded with technology; ‘bad boy fantasy prevalent in so many images of feminized cyborgs’)
touches upon cyborg body politics, exploring the consequences of a montage of organic bodies and machines

26. Cyborg Representations: Gonzáles
Robert Longo: All You Zombies: Truth Before God (1990)
late 20th century experience of modernism: manifestation of the body at war in the theater of politics; hybrid body male/female
cyborg manifests human, animal, and mechanical sexual potency and violence, ironic (inversion of Delacroix’s Liberty Leading People)
What does this figure tell about the difference between cyborgs and people?
What is it a vision of? Why is it political?

27. Cyborg Representations: Gonzáles
González: cyborgs represent ‘interface bw automaton & autonomy’ …
historically connected to increasing pervasiveness of technology in organizing human lives (industrialization and modernization in the 19th and 20th century)
political implications of technology infusing human life (potential for domination, control, violence as well as control of nature, freedom ...)
experience with technology is contradictory

28. Cyborg Representations: Gonzáles
Why are robots not cyborgs?
Why is cyber- (as one of the most used prefixes of the 90s, signifying a world of computer dominance and disembodied experience) included in the notion of cyborg? (cyber-organism)
pre-industrial, industrial, post-industrial cyborg

29. ‘Bill Gates the Borg’
Source: slashdot.org [icon accompanying Microsoft news items; accessed Sept. 25, 2002] courtesy of Sarah Oelker