Carnival Cyborg
Chris Hables Gray
Humans have always aspired to be cyborgs. We have always feared that aspiration. Cyborging ourselves is costuming ourselves from the inside out. It is a disturbing techno-carnival with permanent consequences. Delight full, disturbing imaginings of beautiful and grotesque technoscience. Some dreams and some nightmares seem fated to come to pass. Overdetermined is the academic mystification of this process. Overdetermined: multiple and over sufficient causes? The causes we can catalog; hence this catalog of some of the more subtle explorations of cyborg causality. But beyond causes overdetermination implies meta-causes. They are probably unnameable, but may still be mappable in the intersections, mutations, and creations of images, objects, logics, myths, and reflections. Intersections as where thesis and antithesis cross. Mutations which are always synthesis. Amalgamation and creation in the invention of prosthesis. Thesis, antithesis, synthesis, prosthesis. A cyborg epistemology. A cyborg aesthetics? That remains to be seen. Of what use could it be anyway?
Aesthetically correct or not, cyborgs as image and artifact are here with us now, with a vengeance, as the comic books say. Vengeance of the cyborgs! And what wrong is being revenged? It isn't clear; it may never be. But there is clearly an anger in much that is cyborgian. A powerful expression of this is Robert Longo's All You Zombies: Truth Before God. In this case, as Jennifer Gonzalez points out, the great hybrid's anger seems to rage involuntarily "against its own existence." Certainly, in much cyborg technoscience there is a hatred of life (or a love for the death of the organic body as a door to immortality) as in the old fascist chant "Long Live Death!" The genealogy of such hate-cyborgs can be traced back at least to the front-line fighters of World War I, but perhaps it originated with very first warrior who felt at one with his stone weapon.
There are other types besides the fascist cyborgs, popular as they are in movies and other fiction, his brother the soldier cyborg for example. Their cousin, the space cyborg, is a particularly important creature. It was in 1960, while speculating on adapting humans for space, that the term cyborg, was 'borged itself from cybernetics and organism by Manfred Clynes, concert pianist turned computer inventor, and his boss, Dr. Kevin Kline, a leading psychologist and psychopharmacology advocate.
Only machines and cyborgs can enter space. Humans cannot survive there. Humans cannot survive in many places we go as cyborgs -- under the sea, up in the sky, onto the postmodern battlefield. But we don't like to think about our dependence on machines, for it goes deeper then a simple machine-creature negotiation. It is a relationship, a symbiosis. We are a Cyborg Society of tools, machines, and organisms but we deny it. We deny our connection to the organic, the world in which we are embedded and we deny responsibility for the technosciences we make. Donna Haraway, the great cyborgologist, has campaigned against these denials in beautiful three-dimensional prose since her "Manifesto for Cyborgs" was first promulgated in 1985.
There are several consequences to taking seriously the imagery of cyborgs as other than our enemies. Our bodies, ourselves; bodies are maps of power and identity. Cyborgs are no exceptions. A cyborg body is not innocent; it was not born in a garden; it does not seek unitary identify and so generate antagonistic dualisms without end (or until the world ends); it takes irony for granted. One is too few, and two is only one possibility. Intense pleasure in skill, machine skill, ceases to be a sin, but an aspect of embodiment. The machine is not an it to be animated, worshiped and dominated. The machine is us, our processes, an aspect of our embodiment. We can be responsible for machines; they do not dominate or threaten us. We are responsible for boundaries; we are they. (1985, p. 99, her emphasis)
To fail to come to terms with our cyborgian situation as part of both organic (the "natural") and machinic (industrial civilization) systems would be fatal. Crashing either of these systems will end humanity, and yet the two systems often actually seem to be on a collusion course. Perhaps this is how the repressed is returning, in cyborg as imperfection, self-contradiction and unresolvable paradox. A good Godelian (incomplete and/or paradoxical) model it is --sweet cyborgs, hermaphrodites, killers and saviors, the crippled and the augmented as one system.
But other models also apply. Complex system theories often seem apt, as they should for an organism defined through cybernetics. All the more disturbing is the growing realization that a system cannot understand itself and that many of the more complex systems work by always running on the edge of "out of control." Another story could be in good dialectical form: the thesis of nature produces the antithesis of civilization which produces the synthesis of cyborg. Or, as told in another way by David Channel, the central idea of organic order ("The Great Chain of Being") meets the logical ("The Clockwork Universe") to produce the Age of the Vital Machine where simple living/dead dichotomies are useless. Or, it can be an epic quest of human culture, gradually transcending illusions about our centrality in the cosmos (The Copernican Revolution), our distinction from animals (overthrown by evolutionary theory), and our belief in our own inherent rationality (Freud and the unconscious) to finally come to terms with our own machine nature (The Fourth Discontinuity). Or perhaps it is simpler, this is the great divide between the human and the post-human, a singularity in our history. The whole planet is a cyborg, call it what you will (noosphere, Gaia, Earth, Third Rock From the Sun, body politic). The body politic was not just a Leviathan of subjects looming over the landscape, it included the terrain itself as well.
So it is with today's Cyborg Body Politic, the text of humans and technology in the context of nature, ever more subjugated, ever more entwined with civilization. Humans and our cultures have lived within nature for tens of thousands of years, but now with the extinctions, the explosion of human populations, the modification of every ecological niche to serve us, humans have become one cyborg system.
Cyborgism is therefore promulgated but just as importantly cyborgs proliferate. In their proliferation specificity is crucial. Each cyborg is unique and their general phyla and family structures are not yet known, or even formed. But we can understand a great deal, and through understanding choose a significant part of the future, if not all of it. There are many places one can begin, but for a historian the most tempting seduction is that of the origin story. Myth, tradition, scholarship or family gossip, origin stories exert a powerful fascination in human cultures. Could part of it be that all of us realize we are trapped in time? Forced to march only forward through life. And yet if we could just step back a minute, or even linger a moment here in the now, we might just understand the spirit of our times...
But no, go on, march! So, historians, those of us who glance back over our shoulders as we march on, are among the most infatuated with origin stories. And those about humans, tools, machines, and magic/science are among the most beguiling. It goes back to the very beginning of the human, where some 'ologists put tool-use in the defining role. Homo Faber, man the maker, the tool user. Some of these stories have very materialist plot lines: eye-to-hand-to-tool-makes-the-brain-grow, and repeat. Others are more nuanced. All share a particularly grounded approach to the question "what are the origins of humans?" The evidence all comes from tools, and the body, that very first human tool, unless it was language itself. For now we define intelligence, citizenship even, not by the body as much as the production of language. This could prove fallacious.
Tools are not citizens, but they define ages (pastoral, agricultural, urban), especially war tools (bronze, iron, steel). Countless tools were invented and then humans began to put together a set of increasingly complicated social machines for pursuing community (tribes, familes, villages), war (armies), economic development (irrigation systems, cities, ports), and to scratch that itch for knowledge, or at least effective coherence (religion, art, magic). In the thousands of years of cities the border between human and tool and the very idea of machine-as-complex-system have been carefully explored, usually in religion, art, and magic. Ancient Greek and Hindi myths describe strange half-flesh/half-metal creatures and many stories frame humans as automatons, artifacts animated by gods and goddesses. Humans also make their own sentient creatures in myths, and simulations of the same, for religious temples, the quest for immortality, and amusement. So automatons have a long history, from Hero's mechanical tableaus (300 B.C.E.) through the cock of Strasbourg (1574) and Jacques de Vaucanson's famous shitting mechanical duck (1741) to the profitable creations of Disney Corporations imagineers today. In some ways they are all complex feats of religious engineering.
This tradition of automatons thrived around the world, especially in China, Japan, and Europe until 500 years ago and then, in Europe, it exploded into the general cultural transition which birthed modern science, modern war, and the modern nation state that has quickly led us to the contemporary world. Automatons led to automatic looms and eventually automatic weapons and other machinery as well as a whole range of control systems, from puppets to prosthetics.
This is the time of the Golem, of talking heads and homunculi, of prosthetics that really worked, like the interchangeable prosthetic arms wielded by Count Goetz von Berlichingen, one for court, one for fighting. It is the age where the conceit that the body was a machine was translated through the theater of anatomy and autopsy medicine in particular, into a working hypothesis. The body was auto-deconstructed intellectually, the organs displayed for the scientific gaze.
And it was the age where science began to inform not just ballistics, but logistics; armies became efficient machines and Machiavelli brought to war and politics the calculus of rationality. It has been a mad rush since then. In the last few hundred years industrial and scientific revolutions have more than kept pace with political changes. Mary Shelly crafted Frankenstein's monster from her state-of-the-art scientific (electricity) and technological (computing, medicine) understandings and from her insight into the hidden aspirations of modernity. Her daughter, Ada Lovelace, became the first computer programmer and she worked on the first modern military research and development contract, Charles Babbage's deal with the Royal Navy to produce calculations. This link between the future imaginary (art or science fiction or war plans) and produced technoscience is real and dynamic and it breeds monsters, hopeful and otherwise.
So the creation of physical cyborgs doesn't happen in a vacuum. It is a very specific process that occurs in real places. In our culture, these cyborg sites are clustered in some particular areas: war, space, work, medicine and the imagination.
War is based on what can be done to bodies. The fundamental source of war's power is the killing and maiming of bodies, but power also comes from the conversion of soldiers to cyborgs, as Klaus Theweleit explains:
At the same time, the unity and simplicity of the object-producing machine is dissolved; the machine becomes an expressive multiplicity of semi-human aesthetic forms. Thus the human being becomes an imperfect machine, and the machine an imperfect human being, neither any longer capable of producing, only of expressing and propagating the horrors they have suffered. Perversely distorted, both now become destroyers; and real human beings, and real machines, are the victims of their mutual inversion. The expression-machine airplane drops bombs on production machines, as the mechanized bodies of soldier males annihilate bodies of flesh and blood. The libido of such men is mechanized and their flesh is dehumanized through mechanization.
Klaus Theweleit, quote, 1989
Male Fantasies, Volume 2 male bodies; psychoanalyzing the white terror,
Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, p. 199
A new erotics developed around metal and death there on the Western Front and it haunts world culture to this day.
To survive, a constantly improving system of man-machine weapons must be deployed. Only in that way can the incredible changes of postmodern war be borne. Among the most salient: speed, lethality, information, space. War is 5-dimensional now. Not just up down and sideways but over time and into cyberspace. For war inevitably comes to cyberspace as cyberwar, netwar, information war, just as war has moved out into space, not to fight yet, but for surveillance, and for command and control.
Even civilian space is cyber and outer, but you must be a cyborg of some sort to visit there, whether the prosthesis is the computer that accesses the internet or the spacesuit. For outer space whole technosciences have been developed: biocybernetics, telesystems, bionics. For cyberspace it is the same. Cyborgs are therefore a ubiquitous technology through many inorganic spaces and most others. Cyberspace isn't just inhabited by human cyborgs, pure artificial life, another species of cyborg, is bred there as well by modeling organic information in computer code.
Still, the key space (ground) for our culture, and for cyborgization, is, of course, our human bodies. Into the realm of medicine, that art and technoscience, is where we put our bodies while in need. So we have living, "beating heart" cadavers of various sorts; donor cyborgs going from single-dead to double-dead to triple-dead as their organs are harvested. And we have dead women giving birth to technofetuses, constructed themselves through reproductive apparatuses, and there are now hundreds of thousands of neomorts in comas and vegetative states. Then there are the transplant recipients, hooked up permanently or temporarily to a range of organs acquired as xenoplants from pigs and baboons or from fellow humans for transplantation or the doctors can use constructed cyborg organs like the artificial liver that includes two living dogs or that use less complete biomaterials or, of course, they can deploy "pure" machine hearts and joints and limbs and other artificial prosthetics. To do this the body must be rationalized totally, from muscle dynamics to neurochemicalpsychoendichrinology. We must be made visible scientifically to be made cyborg.
Taking a corpse, freezing it, and carefully slicing it thousands of times seems a horror story, and it must be for the executed criminal who has been so deconstructed, but for techoscientists it is just another mapping of the body.
Every experiment, every tale, begins in the human imagination, which is the mother and father of our cyborg selves just as the dice-rolls and manipulations of genetics parents our organic being. A simple thought (meme) or code (gene) can have incredible effects. Small can be incredibly powerful, it is leverage. And the most crucial nanotechnoscience is certainly genetics. Even the invisible must be made visible, especially if it is the metarule system of our bodies, of evolution itself, we call genetics. Here lurks the potential for cyborg to escape almost totally its human origins.
Cyborging is also something we do to ourselves. We can use it to explore the limits of what control we can have. This seems to be the message of the militant cyborg artist STELARC, whose body is his canvas.
What does STELARC, or all the other cyborgs for that matter, tell us about the aspirations that have led to cyborg? It is only just becoming clear. Certainly, the body is the ground, it cannot be ignored philosophically any more than it can be ignored IRL (in real life) no matter how much one aspires to be virtual. Bodies inhabit space, whether it is outer (the "high ground" to the military), micro (now being colonized by nanotechnology), cyber (the simulated universe of virtual technologies) or symbolic (not cyberspace, as some VR technicians claim, but the "high ground" of Platonic philosophers, the human imagination, origin of cyborg). Space is modified by speed and by simulation. Zoe Sofia has explained how these are all linked in Western Culture through a technoscientific aesthetic that privileges epistemophilia, half-lives (from cyborgs to nuclear decay), origin stories (from the Big Bang to the human and the posthuman), immortality, and extraterrestriality. At the core of this web are the cyborg technosciences, which are clearly extremely evocative technologies. Evocative not just in terms of what they provoke from us as individuals, but especially what they possible futures they might evoke for our culture as a whole. Dreaming of possible constructions of the impossible leads to real transformations, new types of life, changes in the very way we think of space, time, erotics, art, artificiality, perfection, and life, ourselves. Technoscience is constantly deconstructing the idea of the impossible. The only set impossibility is making nostalgia real. The past is gone. We can't go back to the future, except in the movies, we must go forward. The future is, after all, a new environment. The future is what cybernetic-organisms (cyborgs) are for. We have evolved to ride out future shock. In the long run it may not be a good survival strategy but we are committed. Our rush to the future can be a blissful or a nightmare carnival ride. Most likely it will be both.
DANCING CYBORGS
The term cyborg was coined to describe the possibilities of intimate and liberating technologies.
For the exogenously extended organizational complex functioning as an integrated hemostatic system unconsciously, we propose the term "Cyborg." The cyborg deliberately incorporates exogenous components extending the self-regulatory control function of the organism in order to adapt it to new environments. If man is space, in addition to flying his vehicle, must continuously be checking on things and making adjustments merely in order to keep himself alive, he becomes slave to the machine. The purpose of the Cyborg...is to provide an organizational system in which such robot-like problems are taken care of automatically and unconsciously, leaving man free to explore, to create, to think, and to feel.
Manfred Clynes and Nathan S. Kline, "Cyborgs in Space," Astronautics, September, 1960, p. 27.
But as the old tales of the Golem show, and as Mary Shelly demonstrated in Frankenstein, the first great cyborg story, liberation isn't inevitable.
Cyborgs are invented as new technosciences. Like culture, they are constructed out of past and possibilities. They -- we -- are as much works of art as our identities. The proliferation of cyborgs is the promise of monsters, the promise of possibilities. Horror is possible, perhaps inevitable. But resistance, even joy, should be just as possible. Cyborg epistemology shows that there is no inevitable dialectical lock step. Prosthetic additions are always possible, on the body and on culture, and therefore on the future.
Monica Casper's image of the cyborg carnival is an apt one. Cyborgs are often grotesque, illegitimate, disordered, amalgamations that transgress not just good taste but good sense. They are dangerous. They are exciting as well, transcending, exuberant, even liberating. They dwell on the border between cultures, between living and dead, between organic and inorganic, between natural and artificial, between now and the future, and doing so they obscure, and reify, these very boundaries. We must carefully choose the borders we inhabit and transgress. We must carefully choose our stimulations, the music we dance to, the costumes we wear. Or the future won't be ours and we won't even have a good time. We are, after all, our rituals. It's our life, our carnival. As individuals we can cry if we want to, we can dance, we can love and hate, we can leave early, we can pretend it isn't happening. But we can't stop the cyborg carnival, it is already well underway.
FOOTNOTES
0 This cyborg epistemology was first elucidated in Chris Hables Gray, Steven Mentor, and Heidi J. Figueroa-Sarriera "Cyborgology: Constructing the Knowledge of Cybernetic Organisms" in Gray, Mentor, and Figueroa-Sarriera, eds., The Cyborg Handbook, New York: Routledge, 1995, pp. 1-15. I almost feel like apologizing for citing this book and related work by myself and a handful of fellow cyborgologists as often as I do in this essay, but that's what our research is for. In a sense our work is itself a prosthesis, to help society reflect on, even shape, our ongoing cyborgization.
1 Perhaps to mediate between the body and culture, as is proposed by some of the participants in the Fall 1991 Banff Centre for the Arts "Virtual Seminar on the Bioapparatus," described in Bioapparatus, Banff, Canada: Banff Centre for the Arts, 1991.
2 Jennifer Gonzalez, "Envisioning Cyborg Bodies: Notes From Current Research," in The Cyborg Handbook, pp. 267-280.
3 Death as a door to immortal life is an old human theme in religion that is now well established in technoscience. For many cyborg and computer researchers it is their fundamental motivation, as Grant Fjermedal reveals in interviews with scientists at Stanford, Carnegie-Mellon, the University of California, MIT, and other elite sites in his The Tomorrow Makers: A Brave New World of Living-Brain Machines, New York, MacMillan, 1986. It is also clear in such transhumanist and posthumanist periodicals as Mondo 2000 and Extropy.
4 On the fascist cyborg's genesis in World War I see Klaus Theweleit's Male Fantasies,Volume 2: Male Bodies: Psychoanalyzing the White Terror, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989.
5 General discussions of cyborg literature: Anne Balsamo's Technologies of the Gendered Body, Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Press, 1995; Scott Bukatan's Terminal Identity: The Virtual Subject in Postmodern Science Fiction, Durham, North Carolina, Duke University Press, 1993. The best article on Terminator/Arnold Schwarzenegger is Jonathan Goldberg's "Recalling Totalities: The Mirrored Stages of Arnold Schwarzenegger" in The Cyborg Handbook, pp. 223-254. For a rich discussion of Star Trek: The Next Generation's Fascist Borg, see Cynthia J. Fuchs, "'Death is Irrelevant': Cyborgs, Reproduction, and the Future of Male Hysteria" in The Cyborg Handbook, pp. 281-300. The work of N. Katherine Hayles is central to this burgeoning field. See for example "The Life Cycle of Cyborgs: Writing the Posthuman" in The Cyborg Handbook, pp. 321-340. Of course much of the best cyborgology is in the form of science fiction stories. There are to many wonderful ones to be listed here.
6 The best discussion of war and cyborgism is Les Levidow and Kevin Robins, eds., Cyborg Worlds: The Military Information Society, New York: Columbia University Press, 1991.
7 Manfred Clynes and Nathan S. Kline, "Cyborgs and Space,"Astronautics, Sept., pp. 26-27, 74-75; reprinted in The Cyborg Handbook, pp. 29-34 and Clynes' interview and article, "Cyborg II: Sentic Space Travel, pp. 43-54 and pp. 35-42.
8 Donna Haraway "A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist Feminism in the 1980s" reprinted in Simians, Cyborgs and Women, New York: Routledge, 1991.
9 On the limits of system self-understanding see Gregory Bateson's Steps to an Ecology of Mind, New York: Bantam, 1972. Kevin Kelly's Out of Control, New York: Harper, 1995 is a good survey of contemporary complex system's theory with an emphasis on the limits of what it can ever hope to explain.
10 David Channel, The Vital Machine: A Study of Technology and Organic Life, New York: Oxford University Press, 1991.
11 All laid out in amusing detail in Bruce Mazlish's The Fourth Discontinuity: The Co-Evolution of Humans and Machines, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993.
12 "The Singularity: Within thirty years, we will have the technological means to create superhuman intelligence. Shortly after, the human era will be ended" by Vernor Vinge. Presented at Vision-21 Symposium, March 30-31, 1993. Reprinted in the Winter 1993 issue of Whole Earth Review. Available from the Extropians Mailing List: [ habs@extropy.org]. Ira Livingston and Judith Halberstam, eds., Posthuman Bodies, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995 have a range of academic takes on the posthuman.
13 Donna Haraway, "Cyborgs and Symbionts: Living Together in the New World Order," in The Cyborg Handbook, pp. xi-xx; Gregory Stock, Metaman: The Merging of Humans and Machines into a Global Superorganism, New York: Simon and Schuster, 1993.
14 Thomas Laqueur, Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud, Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1990.
15 The best book on the relationship of science fiction to technoscience is H. Bruce Franklin's War Stars: The Superweapon and the American Imagination, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988. I update this story in Chris Hables Gray, "'There Will Be War!': Future War Fantasies and Militaristic Science Fiction in the 1980s," Science-Fiction Studies, #64, vol. 21, part 3, November, 1994, pp. 315-336. For hopeful monsters go to Donna Haraway's essay "The Promises of Monsters: A Regenerative Politics for Inappropriated/d Others" in Lawrence Grossberg et al, eds., Cultural Studies, New York: Routledge, 1992.
16 Elaine Starry, The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985.
17 Modris Ekstein, The Rites of Spring: The Great War and the Birth of the Modern Age, Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1989.
18 Paul Virilio, Pure War, New York: Semiotext(e), 1983; Chris Hables Gray, Postmodern War, New York: Guilford Press, 1997.
19 John Arquilla and David Ronfeldt, "Cyberwar is Coming!", Journal of Comparative Strategy, Vol. 12, no. 2, pp. 141-165, 1993. For up-to-the-minute information on cyberwar: [www.psycom.net/iwar1.html] and [www.fas.org/pub/gen/fas/cp/swett.html].
20 Adele Clarke, "Modernity, Postmodernity, & Reproductive Processes, or 'Mommy, Where Do Cyborgs Come From Anyway?'"; Linda Hogle, "Tales From the Cryptic: Technology Meets Organism in the Living Cadaver," both in The Cyborg Handbook, pp. 139-155 and pp. 203-217; Chris Hables Gray, "Medical Cyborgs: Artificial Organs and the Quest for the Posthuman" in Gray, ed., Technohistory: Using the History of Technology in Interdisciplinary Research, Melbourne, Florida: Krieger Publishing, 1996, pp. 141-178.
21 For some deeply disturbing and exciting visions of what this might mean peruse these well illustrated techno-fantasies: Dougal Dixon, Man After Man: An Anthropology of the Future, New York: St. Martin's Press, 1990; Brian Stableford, Future Man: Brave New World or Genetic Nightmare?, New York: Crown Publishers, 1984; Peter Lorie and Sid Murray-Clark, History of the Future: A Chronology, New York: Doubleday, 1989.
22 The transsexual cyborg media theorist Allucquere Rosanne Stone has written some of the best analysis of the importance of the body in: The War of Desire and Technology at the Close of the Mechanical Age, Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 1995.
23 On speed: Paul Virilio, Speed and Politics: An Essay on Dromology, New York: Semiotext(e), 1986. On simulation: Jean Baudrillard, Simulations, New York: Semiotext(e), 1983.
24 Zoe Sofia, "Exterminating Fetuses: Abortion, Disarmament, and the Sexo-Semiotics of Extra-Terrestrialism," Diacritics 14, pp. 47-59.
25 Best explored recently in Paul Edwards, Closed Worlds, Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 1996 and in Sherry Turkle's work.
26 As a grwoing number of self-described cyborg anthropologists, such as Sarah Williams, gary Lee Downey, and Joseph Dumit have argued. Theirmanifesto and other interventions are in the Cyborg Anthropology section of The Cyborg Handbook, pp. 341-392.
27 The potential for evil in cyborg technosciences is incredible, not just in war, but for free society in general. For a very disturbing example see Jose M. R. Delgado's Physical Control of the Mind: Toward a Psychocivilized Society, New York: Harper, 1969. The psychopathology of such body despising authoritarian dreams are dissected in Heidi J. Figueroa-Sarriera's "Children of the Mind With Disposable Bodies," The Cyborg Handbook, pp. 127-137.
28 Monica J. Casper, "Fetal Cyborgs and Technomoms on the Reproductive Frontier: Which Way to the Carnival?" in The Cyborg Handbook, pp. 183-202.
29 As is explored in Chela Sandoval's "New Sciences: Cyborg Feminism and the Methodology of the Oppressed," Joseba Gabilondo's "Postcolonial Cyborgs: Subjectivity in the Age of Cybernetic Reproduction," and William R. Macauley and Angel J. Gordo-Lopez's "From Cognitive Psychologies to Mythologies: Advancing Cyborg Textualities for a Narrative of Resistance" in The Cyborg Handbook, pp. 407-444.
Roger Caillois
Żywioł i ład
Definicja gry i zabawy
W 1938r., J. Huizinga napisał pracę „Homo ludens”, w której zawarł definicję zabawy:
czynność swobodna, odczuwana jako “nie tak pomyślana” i pozostająca poza obrębem zwykłego życia
nie łączy się z nią żaden interes materialny, nie można przez nią osiągnąć korzyści
dokonuje się w obrębie własnego czasu i we własnej przestrzeni
przebiega w pewnym porządku, według określonych regułv
powołuje do zycia związki społeczne, które otaczają się tajemnicą,
przy pomocy przebrania uwydatnia swoją inność wobec otaczającego swiata
R. Caillois polemizuje z definicją Huizingi: jego zdaniem gra i zabawa prawie zawsze jest widowiskiem. W trakcie gry i zabawy wystawia się tajemnicę na widok publiczny. W grze i zabawie dominuje element fikcji i rozrywki. Callois częściowo rozwinął myśl Huizingi, wyróżnił 6 cech gry:
Gra – czynność bezproduktywna: Gra nie zawsze jest interesowna, np. zakłady, gry hazardowe, wyścigi, loterie zawsze wiążą się z jakimś interesem. nawet jeśli gra się o pieniądze jest jednak zajęciem absolutnie bezproduktywnym: dochodzi w niej do przemieszczenia własności, ale nie zostają wytworzone żadne dobra – na tym polega różnica między grą a pracą i sztuką.
Gra – okazja do czystego wydatkowania, do trwonienia czasu, energii, pomysłowości, zręczności, jak również pieniędzy (np. na zakup akcesoriów do gry czy opłacenie odpowiedniego lokalu).
Gra – czynność dobrowolna:
P. Valery: z zabawą mamy do czynienia wówczas, gdy „znudzenie kładzie kres temu, co zapoczątkowała ochota”. Callois również uważa, że do gry i zabawy dochodzi tylko wtedy, gdy gracze chcą się bawić. Gdybyśmy brali w niej udział pod przymusem, stałaby się ona mitręgą.
Gra – czynność wyodrębniona:
Gra dokonuje się w obrębie własnego czasu i we własnej przestrzeni. Bawimy się np. na arenie, boisku, ringu, scenie, szachownicy. W grze nie liczy się nic, co się dzieje poza granicami tej przestrzeni. To samo dotyczy czasu: rozgrywka zaczyna się i kończy na dany znak. Jest to świat zastrzeżony, zamknięty, pozostający pod ochroną.
Gra - to działanie zawierając e element niepewności – jeśli można przewidzieć jej wynik, gracze przestają grać. Podczas gry gracz musi wymyślać natychmiastową odpowiedź w obrębie określonych reguł – to wyjaśnia po części przyjemność płynącą z gry.
Gra – czynność ujęta w normy: Wiele gier i zabaw odbywa się bez reguł (bawienie się lalkami, zabawy w żołnierzy i policjantów oraz inne gry zakładające improwizację). W przypadku takich gier poczucie „tak jakby” zastępuje wszelkie reguły i pełni ich funkcje. 2 typy gier:
ujęte w reguły, gra się „na serio”- np. szachy, kręgle, polo
fikcyjne, gra opiera się na naśladownictwie życia – np. zabawa w detektywów, piratów.
Gra nie ma sensu poza samą sobą, dlatego jej zasady są kategoryczne i absolutne. Jeśli ktoś oszukuje podczas gry, nie kwestionuje jej zasad, a jedynie nadużywa lojalności innych osób. Grę niweczy ten, kto uważa, że nie ma ona sensu.
Jeśli ktoś nie zna jej reguł, może chcieć ją naśladować myśląc, że to jedno z codziennych zachowań – gra w grę: np. dzieci posuwające pionki na fikcyjnej szachownicy i bawiące się w „granie w szachy”.
Gra – czynność fikcyjna: towarzyszy im poczucie wtórnej rzeczywistości lub oderwania od życia powszedniego.
Klasyfikacja gier i zabaw
4 podstawowe rodzaje gry:
agon – np. piłka nożna, szachy, gra w kule
charakter zawodów sportowych, tzn. walki w warunkach sztucznie stworzonej równości szans. współzawodnictwo skoncentrowane na jednej cesze np. siła, pamięć, szybkość, wytrwałość
przeciwnicy początkowo dysponują ta sama ilością i jakością pewnych elementów (szachy)
zakłada napiętą uwagę, odpowiedni trening, max wysiłek i wole walki, wymaga zdyscyplinowania i wytrwałości
odwołuje się wyłącznie do osobistych walorów i ma na celu ich ujawnienie
poza grą spotykamy duch agon w innych zjawiskach kulturowych, np. pojedynkach i turniejach rycerskich
odwołuje się do odpowiedzialność osobistej
występuje też agon zwierząt, w rywalizacji spontanicznie wyznaczają sobie granice, takie zjawisko występuje np. wśród fok, niedźwiadków, psów, kotów.
2. alea (łac. gra w kości) – np. loteria, ruletka, orzeł i reszka
decyzje nie zależą od gracza
chodzi o zwycięstwo nie tyle nad przeciwnikiem, co nad losem
ujawnia, kogo los obdarzy tym razem łaską
nie ceni trudu, cierpliwości, zręczności, kwalifikacji; eliminuje walory zawodowe
zakłada totalne powodzenie albo totalne niepowodzenie
zawodnik liczy na jakąś wskazówkę, na wszystko, tylko nie na siebie
likwiduje przewagę jednostek – wszyscy absolutnie równi wobec losu
Agon i alea wyrażają postawy przeciwstawne i poniekąd symetryczne, obie podlegają jednak temu samemu prawu – sztucznie wytwarzanie między graczami warunków absolutnej równości, jakiej rzeczywistość ludziom odmawia.
Stanowią próbę zastąpienia nieładu właściwego życiu potocznemu sytuacjami doskonałymi
Agon i alea to sposoby postrzegania świata –aktywność kontra pasywność
3. mimicra – np. granie pirata, Nerona, Hamleta
czasowe przyjęcie iluzji
człowiek staje się postacią wyimaginowaną i zachowuje się stosownie do tego
u kręgowców: naśladownictwo w formie „zarażania się”, np. ziewaniem, bieganiem, utykaniem, uśmiechem
naśladowanie i przebieranie się
przedstawienia teatralne i gra aktorska
pokrewieństwo z agonem – konkurs na najładniejsze przebranie
nie występuje podporządkowanie się regułom
jedyna reguła – nieustanna inwencja
4. ilinx – ruch obrotowy (aby wywołać w sobie stan oszołomienia)
próba chwilowego unicestwienia stabilności odbioru i narzucenie świadomości swego rodzaju rozkosznej paniki
dążenie do osiągnięcia spazmu, transu, upojenia
dążenie do oszołomienia wywołanego zawrotem głowy, np. tańczący derwisze (osiąganie ekstazy podczas kręcenia się dokoła własnej osi przy wtórze uderzeń w bębenek) lub meksykańscy voladores (obwiązują się liną w odpowiedni sposób i skaczą ze szczytu masztu, udając ptaki, kręcąc się przy tym dokoła
kręcenie się dziecka w kółko – dążenie do zachwiania równowagi i zaćmienia świadomości
oszołomienie tego typu często idzie w parze z tłumionymi zazwyczaj zamiłowaniem do nieładu i niszczenia
huśtawka, karuzela, jazda na saneczkach wywołują podobne efekty
w dorosłości: tańce, upijanie się, jazda motocyklem
Gra opiera się na 2 przeciwstawnych sposobach bawienia się:
paidia (zabawa) – rozrywka, improwizacja, wyobraźnia
ludus (gra) – podporządkowanie się konwencjom [ to nie kategorie zabawy, ale sposoby bawienia się]
Od zamieszania do reguły
gry i zabawy dają świadectwo wartościom intelektualnym i moralnym danej kultury, przyczyniając się ponadto do ich precyzowania i rozwijania
gdy tylko pojawią się konwencje, techniki, przybory – wraz z nimi pojawiają się pierwsze wyodrębnione gry i zabawy i zaczynają oddzielając się drogi: agon, alea itd.
Ludus - uzupełnienie i niejako „dokształcenie” typu paidia, która ujmuje w karby i wzbogaca. Dostarcza on sposobności do ćwiczeń i na ogół prowadzi do uzyskania pewnej określonej sprawności, mistrzostwa w posługiwaniu się jakimś przyborem.
Różnica pomiędzy ludus i agon polega na tym, że w ludus grający dokonuje wysiłku i rozwija swój talent niezależnie od wyraźnego uczucia rywalizacji
Kombinacja ludus i alea – w pasjansach, gdy zręczne manewrowanie kartami wpływa nieco na końcowy wynik
Ludus i mimikra – pomniejszone modele samolotów / widowisko teatralne
Paidia + alea = nie ma sojuszu pomiędzy tymi działaniami (hałas i ruch paidii+ bierne wyczekiwanie na wyrok losu alei)
Ludus + ilinx = kalkulacja nie ma nic wspólnego z czystym uniesieniem
ludus sam w sobie wydaje się być czymś niepełnym, można powiedzieć, że pozwala przezwyciężyć nudę
na ludus ciąży cecha agon, która ujawnia się w zależności lud od mody, np. jojo, tiki-tiki, gniotki (w książce podaja bilboket i diabolo, ale ja nie wiem, co to jest)
Rózne formy ludus:
Cywilizacja przemysłowa zrodziła pewną szczególną formę ludus - hobby rozumiane jako uboczne, bezinteresowne zajęcie, kolekcjonerstwo tylko dla przyjemności, amatorskie uprawianie sztuki, majsterkowanie itd. Zajęcia te są formą kompensowania okaleczeń, jakie osobowości ludzkie zadaje mechaniczna i pozbawiona charakteru praca taśmowa. Zauważono, że robotnik przy uprawianiu hobby, wykonuje pomniejszone modele maszyn, liczy się praca gestów, a nie inteligencja. Jeśli zaś robotnik tworzy pomniejszone modele, jest to swego rodzaju zwycięstwo nad rzeczywistością.
Pierwotnej chęci rozrywki ludus podsuwa cały czas nowe przeszkody, wynajduje nowe sposoby, aby zaspokoić potrzebę odprężenia, jak również nieprzemożną u człowieka potrzebę marnotrawienia wiedzy, pilności, sprawności, inteligencji, itd.
Choć w ludus nie dochodzi do głosu postawa psychiczna tak skrystalizowana jak w agon, alea, mimicry czy illinx, to ujmując działanie typu paidia w karby, nadaje kategoriom gry i zabawy czystość i doskonałość
Inne metamorfozy ludus (oprócz paidii):
Wan (Chiny) – słowo, które ma wiele znaczeń:
zajęcia na wpół machinalne, które pozwalają błąkąć się myślom, jest to leniwa kontemplacja np. wytrwałe gładzenie bryłki jadeitu
zabawa dziecięce i wszystkie beztroskie, pogodne rozrywki, także praktyki seksualne uprawiane w celu zabawy (igraszki)
również określenie zabaw wymagających zastanowienia i wyłączających pospiech, np. szachy, warcaby, układanki
określa również przyjemność, z jaka oceniamy wyborny smak potrawy lub wina, zamiłowanie do kolekcjonowania dzieł sztuki, lubowanie się w czymś
Na przykładzie słowa wan przekonujemy się, że los kultur można odczytać także z gier i zabaw, jako że kultura Chin, podobnie jak wymyślone przez nią gry, jest nasycona mądrością, rozważna.
To, czy dana kultura przedkłada agon, alea, mimcry czy illinx, wpływa na jej przyszłość.