Cyborg Eye
Project: Designing Science Fiction Scenarios

"At the centre of my ironic faith, my blasphemy, is the image of the cyborg. (...)A cyborg is a cybernetic organism, a hybrid of machine and organism, a creature of social reality as well as a creature of fiction. Social reality is lived social relations, our most important political construction, a world-changing fiction. (...) Modern medicine is also full of cyborgs, of couplings between organism and machine, each conceived as coded devices, in an intimacy and with a power that was not generated in the history of sexuality. Cyborg 'sex' restores some of the lovely replicative baroque of ferns and invertebrates (such nice organic prophylactics against heterosexism). Cyborg replication is uncoupled from organic reproduction. Modern production seems like a dream of cyborg colonization work, a dream that makes the nightmare of Taylorism seem idyllic. And modern war is a cyborg orgy, coded by C3I, command-control-communication-intelligence, an $84 billion item in 1984'sUS defence budget. I am making an argument for the cyborg as a fiction mapping our social and bodily reality and as an imaginative resource suggesting some very fruitful couplings. Michael Foucault's biopolitics is a flaccid premonition of cyborg politics, a very open field. (...) 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. Ths cyborg is our ontology; it gives us our politics. The cyborg is a condensed image of both imagination and material reality, the two joined centres structuring any possibility of historical transformation."

Donna Haraway, "A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century," in Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (New York; Routledge, 1991), pp.149-181.




1. (above) External vision

2. (middle) This is what the blind Canadian sees through the small camera on his glasses that simply converts light into pixels and concequenlty transforms it into electrical signals that run through the cable wire embedded on his head, ultimately stimulating the visual centre of the brain.

3. (below) This is the image he now perceives from the outside world, since his out-dated system started to decay. The scientist who studied and applied the system died without finishing his research.

A sad story of a post-goth E. Scissorhands

From, The Cyborg Revolution [2005]

( edit / delete )  Tue, Jun 29, 2010  Permanent link
Categories: cyborg, assemblage, body, future, sci-fi, robot, technology, essay, Haraway, manifesto, tools
Sent to project: Designing Science Fiction Scenarios

RSS for this post