|
Sign In to gain access to subscriptions and/or personal tools.
|
Unfinished Work
From Cyborg to Cognisphere
N. Katherine Hayles
English Department, University of California, Los Angeles
The cyborg that Donna Haraway appropriated in ‘Manifesto for Cyborgs’ as a metaphor for political action and theoretical inquiry has ceased to have the potency it did 20 years ago. While Haraway has turned from a central focus on technoculture to companion species, much important cultural work remains to be done, especially in networked and programmable media. Problems with the cyborg as a metaphor include the implication that the liberal humanist subject, however problematized by its hybridization with cybernetic mechanism, continues as a singular entity operating with localized agency. In a word, the cyborg is not networked enough to encompass the emergent possibilities associated with the Internet and the world-wide web and other phenomena of the contemporary digital era. Instead I propose the idea of the cognisphere. As operational concept and suggestive metaphor, the cognisphere recognizes that networked and programmable media are not only more pervasive than ever before in human history but also more cognitively powerful. It is closely associated with what many researchers regard as a major insight: the idea that the physical world is fundamentally computational. While these scientists regard computation as a physical process, the cultural critic is apt to see it as an over-determined metaphor. The binary choice between seeing the computational universe as a literal description of the physical world and reading it as an over-determined metaphor misses a crucial aspect of contemporary cultural dynamics: the interaction between means and metaphor, technology and cultural presupposition. Taking this dynamic into account leads to a more complete understanding summed up in the aphorism, ‘What we make and what (we think) we are co-evolve together.’
Key Words: computation Europe • emergence Europe • evolution Europe • networks Europe • technoscience
References
- Ambrose, Stanley H. (2001) ‘Paleolithic Technology and Human Evolution’ , Science 291(5509): 1748-1753 .[CrossRef][Web of Science][Medline]
[Order article via Infotrieve]
- Bamford, James (1983) The Puzzle Palace: Inside America’s Most Secret Intelligence Agency. New York: Penguin .
- Bamford, James (2002) Body of Secrets: Anatomy of the Ultra-secret National Security Agency. New York: Anchor .
- Fredkin, Edward (2001) Introduction to Digital Philosophy. URL (consulted July 2006): http://www.digitalphilosophy.org
- Haraway, Donna (1985) ‘Manifesto for Cyborgs: Science, Technology and Socialist Feminism in the 1980s’ , Socialist Review 15(2): 65-107 .(Reprinted in revised form as ‘A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-feminism in the Late Twentieth Century’, pp. 149-181 in Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature. New York: Routledge , 1991.)
- Haraway, Donna (1988) ‘Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism as a Site of Discourse on the Privilege of Partial Perspective’ , Feminist Studies 14(3): 575-599 .[CrossRef]
- Haraway, Donna (2003) The Companion Species Manifesto: Dogs, People, and Significant Otherness. Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press .
- Hayles, N. Katherine (1999) How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics. Chicago: University of Chicago Press .
- Hayles, N. Katherine (2005) My Mother Was a Computer: Digital Subjects and Literary Texts. Chicago: University of Chicago Press .
- Savage, Charlie (2005) ‘Wiretaps Said to Sift All Overseas Contacts: Vast US Efforts Seen on Eavesdropping’ , Boston.com. URL (consulted July 2006): http://www.boston.com/news/nation/washington/articles/2005/12/23/wiretaps_said_to_sift_all_overseas_contacts?mode=PF
- Thompson, Evan and Francisco J. Varela (forthcoming) Why the Mind Isn’t in the Head: The Lived Body in Biology, Cognitive Science, and Human Experience. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press .
- Whalen, Thomas (2000) ‘Data Navigation, Architectures of Knowledge’ , paper presented at the Banff Summit on Living Architectures: Designing for Immersion and Interaction, Banff New Media Institute, 23 Sept.
- Wolfram, Stephen (2002) A New Kind of Science. New York: Wolfram Media .
Theory, Culture & Society, Vol. 23, No. 7-8,
159-166 (2006)
DOI: 10.1177/0263276406069229
 CiteULike  Complore  Connotea  Del.icio.us  Digg  Reddit  Technorati  Twitter What's this?
|
|
