iHuman

In our current culture, nearly any task is completed via, or with the help, of some technological appliance. We no longer seek to do things ourselves, opting to utilize our computer based skills. We live in a culture constantly seeking to upgrade things, and this even means ourselves.

Are humans of the 21st Century cyborgs? Is the idea of the “natural body”, without the shaping and development that technology has had on contemporary bodies, an absurd one? According to Stelarc, an Australian performance artist, “The body is obsolete” (Shaw 2008, p81). Sharing this view, philosopher Bernard Stiegler also argues that “The human’, invents himself in the technical by inventing the tool - by becoming exteriorised techno-logically.” (Stiegler, 1998, p.141) 

 Michael Foucault builds on the idea of the “docile body” (Shaw 2008, p82) in his book “Discipline and Punish: The Birth of Prison (1977)”. In his writings, he compares the  well disciplined army to “a well oiled machine” (Shaw 2008, p82). This means that all the parts are smoothly in effect only once the “individual parts have been tailored to fit an exact function” (Shaw 2008, p82). Thus the human body, and its material, are crafted via the dictation of governments, whom exercise their global power through the control of the soldiers bodies. Likewise, the soldiers themselves are also governed by the technologies of war, meaning that human and technology equal a soldier. A distinct comparison can also be made with the body of a worker and the regimes of industrial capitalism. According to Marx himself, “machinery is put to wrong use, with the object of transforming the workman, from his very childhood, into a part of a specialized machine” (Marx 1990 [1867], p.547)

Wiener offers the observation that “we are not stuff that abides, but patterns that perpetuate themselves” (Wiener 1950, p96). DNA is essentially our bodies code, and information can be transmitted the same way that email is transmitted globally. As new media has now created a participatory audience and collective intelligence, is it any wonder that N. Katherine Hayles wrote “it is not for nothing that “Beam me up, Scotty” has become a cultural icon for the global information society” (Hayes 1999, p2)

Bibiliography

Shaw, D. (2008) “Technoculture: The Key Concepts’; (Oxford Berg Press)

Stiegler, B. (1998) ‘Technics and Time, 1: The fault of Epimetheus’; (Stanford: Stanford University Press)

Marx, K. (1990) “Capital: Volume 1: A Critique of Political Economy’; (Penguin Classics; Reprint edition)

N. Katherine Hayles (1999) “How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature and Informatics”; (The University of Chicago Press, Chicago & London)