Cyborg Anthropology and Posthuman Ethics

Z0981994 Cyborg Anthropology and Posthuman Ethics Paper for Visual Arts and Culture Masters at Durham University, UK Module: Body, Politics and Experience, Anthropology Ghost in The Shell, Mamoru Oshii, 1995 Neil Harbisson and his “eyeborg:” https://followthecolours.co Z0981994 “New science-fiction landscapes are populated with cyborgs of all kinds… it remains to be seen to what extent and in what concrete ways the transformations envisioned by them are in the process of becoming real. This is another task for the anthropology of cyberculture.”1 - Arturo Escobar In an oxymoronic way, the phrase “cyborg anthropology” draws attention to the anthropocentrism of anthropological discourse, and proposes a provocative theory for the alternative worlds and ontologies made by subjects who are biologically and phenomenologically interfacing with technology.2 These “cyborgs,” as Donna Haraway argued in 1984 in ‘A Cyborg Manifesto,’ are to some extent, us all; you do not have to be a “bio-hacking” activist implanting biometric readers under your skin for a YouTube channel or have prosthetic bionic limbs to be a cyborg, in her early definition.3 Others have argued that theory ought to work toward a “posthuman” reworking of traditional western humanism: Rosi Braidotti argues in her 2013 text ‘The Posthuman’ for an ethics developed through redefining humankind as diversely interconnected with all life on the planet, and with technology, thus that a “posthuman” figure emerges.4 The cyborg and the posthuman are not necessarily synonymous but share similar political and ethical goals in theory: to radically redefine the human and the humanities, in order to see a way to better intersubjective and interspecies relations. This essay will examine a variety of cyborg figures in our cultural landscape and will investigate how the subject’s perceptual capacities are altered through “cyborging,” how this might lead to greater intersubjective understanding and empathy, and will advocate an embodied phenomenology for these figures. 1 Arturo Escobar, ‘Welcome to Cyberia,’ in Current Anthropology, Vol 35, No 3 (1994), 213 Gary Lee Downey, Joseph Dumit and Sarah Williams, ‘Cyborg Anthropology,’ in The Cyborg Handbook, ed. Gray. (New York: Routledge, 1995), 341. 3 Donna Haraway, A Cyborg Manifesto, ProQuest Ebook, (2016) 7. 4 Rosi Braidotti, The Posthuman, (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2013), 40. 2 Z0981994 In 1984 Donna Haraway wrote her manifesto for “the cyborg,” a cultural figure and political subjectivity that for her provided “a way out of the maze of dualisms” that plague western humanist narratives on subject formation.5 In her text she is critical of Marxist and radical feminist positions’ continued erasure of polyvocal, postcolonial identities that resist assimilation into the Western genealogy of “woman” that these positions sought to construct.6 She argued in favour of “the cyborg,” an alternative political subjectivity that resists both humanist and feminist essentializing, naturalising strategies, since the cyborg is “a kind of disassembled and reassembled, postmodern collective and personal self,” a hybridised subject in an age of personal electronics and biotechnology.7 Of course, the technological landscape has changed significantly since Haraway wrote her manifesto, and she responds to critiques that her figure retains some of the imperialising vocabulary of the traditions she claims it resists by being “much more careful about describing who counts as a ‘we,’ in the statement, ‘we are all cyborgs.’”8 Chris Hables Gray and Stephen Mentor in their 1995 text ‘The Cyborg Body Politic’ for Gray’s ‘The Cyborg Handbook,’ write that while the cyborg, in Haraway’s political myth, offers “a new map… one potentially more effective in understanding, confronting and reshaping the actual networks of power in late capitalism,” it also has “plenty of possible dystopian endings as well.”9 The utopian feminist science fiction literary figurations that Haraway uses as examples in her manifesto rarely appear in science fiction film, which is oft populated by over-sexualised hypermasculine or hyper-feminine bodies, or else dissolves the body gruesomely (in the sci-fi body-horror of the 80’s), mirroring contemporary anxiety over technology’s intrusion into daily life. While Haraway concedes in her manifesto that “the main trouble with cyborgs… is that they are the illegitimate offspring of militarism and patriarchal capitalism, not to mention state socialism,” the 5 Haraway, A Cyborg Manifesto, 67. Ibid., 24. 7 Ibid., 33. 8 Margaret E. Toye, ‘Donna Haraway’s Cyborg,’ in Hypatia Vol 27, No 1 (2012), 184. 9 Chris Hables Gray and Stephen Mentor, ‘The Cyborg Body Politic,’ in The Cyborg Handbook, ed. Gray. (New York: Routledge, 1995), 459. 6 Z0981994 radical political potential for cyborgs will be contingent on their unfaithfulness to their origins.10 A precarious position, for those of us who are, as Gray and Mentor go on to say, “trapped in patriarchal and late capitalist agencies, dependant on institutions.”11 As iterated by Escobar in this essay’s opening epigraph, the main task of so-called “cyborg anthropology” is to write an ethnography for cyborg subjects, not just in fiction but in society too, and to go some way toward understanding their ontology. In Daniel Black’s article, ‘Where Bodies End and Artefacts Begin,’ he discusses the embodied phenomenology of tool use, using Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s example of a blind man’s cane as limblike extention of the sensing body, as precursor to the kinds of current human-technology interfaces for which a similar “incorporation into the body schema” occurs.12 For modern interfaces, such as with an iPad or other personal electronic device, ergonomic and ‘natural’ modes of use are emphasised in design and production, such that we might “feel” the device as part of the body.13 Seth D. Messinger too, in his article ‘Getting Past the Accident’ explores “prosthesis subjectivity,” the new ontology that aputees with prostheses gain during their rehabilitation, but draws attention to the specific militarisation of soldiers gaining prostheses; with their new limbs they might become “better than well,” and therefore even perhaps a tactical advantage for the military.14 Our bodies are always “socially and politically entangled,” and any anthropological or phenomenological account must thus consider the multifarious external forces that contribute to the subjectivity that cyborg anthropology seeks to account for.15 In Martin Heidegger’s ‘The Question Concerning Technology,’ an oft cited source of philosophy for ethical reorientations to human-technology relations, he wrote in favour of a “poēitic” technological 10 Haraway, A Cyborg Manifesto, 9. Gray and Mentor, ‘The Cyborg,’ 460. 12 Daniel Black, ‘Where Bodies End and Artefacts Begin,’ in Body &Society Vol 20, No 1 (2014), 43. 13 Ibid., 46. 14 Seth D. Messinger, ‘Getting Past the Accident,’ in Medical Anthropology Quarterley Vol 24, No 3 (2010), 282. 15 Ibid., 285. 11 Z0981994 interaction with the world that, rather than treating nature as resource to be exploited (“standingreserve”), reveals the world as it is, as something to care for.16 Heidegger’s argument is in this way, partly ecological, and in this age of environmental disaster and biotechnological manipulation we seem far from improving our relationship to nature; thus it is that the so-called “posthumanities” of the last two decades often invoke Heidegger as precursor to a contemporary argument for a less anthropocentric relationship with both technology and nature. Rosi Braidotti’s text ‘The Posthuman’ reinscribes posthumanities studies as postanthropocentric but not de-humanized, offering new forms of posthuman embodiment that are not transcendent or disembodied, but offer new perceptive orientations to the world.17 The challenge for contemporary fiction, and contemporary cyborgs, is to not recreate as Braidotti says “a hard core, unitary vision of the subject, under the cover of pluralistic fragmentation.”18 Our societal and cultural relationship with new fast-developing technologies is one of a wary ambivalence, and our fictions reflect this sentiment; since we are wholly materially embedded and embodied humans, wether cybernetically integrated or not, theory must always work toward understanding both the multivalent ways that material processes work on the body, as well as the ways we can work through our bodies, to, as Heidegger writes, reveal the world.19 The cyborg figures I will go on to explore have the potential for this reorientation to the world through their cybernetic parts, which offer other hitherto unavailable perceptive abilities that reveal the world in all its splendour. In Haraway’s manifesto one of the literary examples she uses is Anne McCaffrey’s 1969 novel ‘The Ship Who Sang,’ in which physically disabled but mentally exceptional children are given the option to become “brainship” cyborgs.20 Helva, the protagonist is one such cyborg, who is neurologically and sensually linked to her ship, able to both fly the ship and proprioceptively sense any fault in its system 16 Martin Heidegger, The Question Concerning Technology, (New York: Garland Publishing, 1977),10. Braidotti, The Posthuman, 190. 18 Rosi Braidotti, Metmorphoses, (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2002), 258. 19 Heidegger, The Question, 12. 20 Anne McCaffrey, The Ship Who Sang, (US: Walker & Co, 1969) 17 Z0981994 as though it were her body. She is also able to fall in love with her non-cyborg pilot/partner and to both empathise with and help rehabilitate the population of a planet suffering from a paralytic plague, as a result of her augmented cyborg perception. McCaffrey’s description of Helva as materially and sensually embedded in her cyborg body present the character as exemplary of this era of feminist science fiction literature’s focus on boundary-crossing, hybridising transformations of humanity into “posthumanity.” Octavia Butler’s 1987 ‘Xenogenesis’ Nigerian-American character Lilith Iyapo facilitates the genetic fusion with an alien race in order to save Earth, and Joan Slonczewski’s ecofeminist novel ‘A Door into Ocean’ is the story of an all-female alien race of “Sharers” living nonviolently and symbiotically with their eco-system.21 The ecological focus of these stories, mediated by cybernetic integration, is both feminist and utopian in its tone, but as indicated above, these themes are not often prevalent in science fiction film. For the hyper-masculine cybernetic organisms on our screens, from ‘Justice League’s Cyborg, to RoboCob and Darth Vader, the name of the game is usually save the world or destroy the world. There are some contemporary science fiction films that disrupt this narrative however: in ‘Avatar’ and District 9,’ two characters, while not exactly becoming the traditional cyborg of human-machine hybrid, experience alien subjectivity by literally becoming-alien. Both films carry ecological messages, suggesting that through these protagonist’s metamorphoses they begin to empathise with the plight of the aliens and thus shift their human-centric worldview to the kind of “transversal alliance” that Braidotti calls for.22 The character Motoko Kusanagi in Oshii’s 1995 anime film ‘Ghost in the Shell,’ is a fully cybernetic human, created by ‘Section Nine’ who employ her as a public security agent. The cybernetic body modifications in the film offer humans enhanced “kinaesthetic response and musculature,” but Motoko also has an augmented brain, and with this upgrade comes the risk of being hacked by an outside 21 Octavia Butler, Xenogenesis, (US: Grand Central Publishing, 1987-89); Joan Slonczewski, A Door Into Ocean, (New York: Arbor House, 1986) 22 Braidotti, The Posthuman, 103. Z0981994 force.23 Ultimatly the film deals with a “posthuman” cyborg in a crisis of identity; the “ghost” in the cybernetic shell is what she identifies as human, but recognises that the shell, her face, her voice and her “cyber-brain” connection to the data net all contribute to her identity and are all inorganic additions.24 In one interaction, Motoko tells the ‘Puppet Master’ (who Section 9 are hunting) “I want a guarantee that I can still be myself,” to which he, a sentient A. I. program, replies “why would you wish to?... Your effort to remain what you are is what limits you.”25 The forms of cyborg embodiment in the film offer many new perceptive capabilities, but also lead to existential crises; as stated above, the cyborg figures in our fictions, and in reality, are always materially embedded, both in bodies and in techno-capitalist systems, whereby both Helva and Motoko, and the soldier in Missinger’s article are at the mercy of corporations or govornments who created their cybernetic parts in the first place. In Gray and Mentor’s article however, they assert that while around the globe, cybernetics systems are implemented to kill insurgents, control factory workers and capitalise on resources, there are also more hopeful stories: “the same technology that will hardwire a pilot into the computer that flies the jet and enables the missiles will allow our friend, hit by a speeding truck, to walk again.”26 The landscape is complex, and permeated by ambivalent figures, unsure of their place or identity amidst exponential technological developments. Consider the case of Neil Harbisson, a real-life cyborg: Harbisson was born with complete ‘achromatopsia,’ a rare condition that results in black and white vision, and has what he calls an “eyeborg,” a small camera on an antenna implanted into his skull, which translates colours into notes on a tonal scale and plays them to him through bone conduction (and makes him look rather like a high-tech angler fish). His cyborg technology has been gradually streamlined over the years, and he now describes it as “an extension of my body,” enabling him to hear colour and create art based on his 23 Angus Mcblane, ‘Just a Ghost in a Shell?’ in Anime and Philosphy, Steiff and Tamplin eds. (Chicago: Open Court, 2010), 4. 24 Ibid., 6. 25 Ibid., 7 26 Gray and Mentor, ‘The Cyborg Body Politic,’ 465. Z0981994 new perceptive abilities.27 Like Helva and Motoko, and Merleau-Ponty’s blind man, Harbisson experiences the “eyeborg” phenomenologically, through habit of use, as part of his body.28 The art he creates is a way to explain the peculiarities of his new sense to the world, both in order to bring awareness to his cyborg ontology, and to encourage other humans to be unafraid of becoming humanmachine hybrids. In fact, Harbisson and his childhood friend Moon Ribas founded the ‘Cyborg Foundation’ in 2010, a platform to “promote cyborg art and defend cyborg rights,” and protect the “sanctity of cyborg bodies.”29 Harbisson’s promotion of “cyborging” our bodies has a wider scope than pure bodily augmentation; he describes the similarities between his particular mode of perceiving visuals through sound, and animals like dolphins using echolocation, as bringing him “closer to animals and nature,” perhaps enabling a deeper interspecies understanding and respect.30 His ideas echo both Heidegger and Braidotti’s calls for a “poēitic” reorientation to nature; as a posthuman cyborg, Harbisson is uniquely placed to promote the potential for his perspective as a model for future artists, cyborgs and posthumans to enter into a “poetic revealing” of the beauty in the world.31 Indeed, as manifesto on the Cyborg Foundation website, the founders have said “we believe that by creating new senses we reveal a reality that our natural senses don’t allow us to perceive. That’s why we don’t subscribe to VR (virtual reality) or AR (augmented reality); and instead aim for RR, revealed reality.”32 Moon Ribas, co-founder of the foundation and cyborg too, has a kind of ‘bio-hacked’ implant in her elbow that enables her to experience earthquakes all over the globe, as they are registered on online seismographs. Both Harbisson and Ribas have thus entered into a subtly poetic and sensual interface with their environments, both immediate and far removed, through the catalyst of cybernetic technology. However, it is necessary, as Downey, Dumit and Williams iterate, for cyborg anthropology to remain self-critical and accountable to the academic theories that preceded it, and not 27 ‘World's first cyborg wants to hack your body,’ (2015). http://edition.cnn.com/2014/09/02/tech/innovation/cyborg-neil-harbisson-implant-antenna/. 28 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Phenomenology of Perception, (London: Routledge Classics, 2002),166. 29 https://www.cyborgfoundation.com 30 ‘I am a cyborg,’ (2014). http://universitypost.dk/article/i-am-cyborg-i-hear-colours-and-i-wear-songs- parties. 31 Heidegger, The Question, 35. 32 https://www.cyborgfoundation.com Z0981994 to lose sight, through a radical move, of the socio-political material culture in which these cyborgs are creating themselves.33 The ‘posthuman’ cyborg figures described here have gained new perceptive abilities and the potential for deeper empathy with other species; an embodied phenomenology can go some way to accounting for their multivalent ways of experiencing the world, as new kinds of beings. Social anthropologists seeking to write ethnography with these subjects must however, be attentive to their materially grounded, and politically embedded existence, as beings whose bodies may be subject to external forces of control, ownership and surveillance, only some of which we may be aware. As Gray and Mentor write, “there is no choice between the utopia and the dystopia… they are both here. We are learning to inhabit this constructed, ambiguous body.”34 Both fiction and the art of cyborgs like Harbisson offer cultural articulations and philosophical musings on the future of humanity, helping create discourse on and raise awareness of the complex political landscape in which cyborgs and posthumans are embedded. While Helva, Motoko, Harbisson and Ribas have the chance at experiencing new perceptive abilities, they are also, by virtue of their inorganic parts, subject to vestiges of humanist anthropocentrism remaining in society and culture, and thus a resistance to shifts in definitions of “the human,” and are also necessarily part of a network of labour and production. Who made the technology Harbisson and Ribas use? In which factory, and in which ecosystem are their inorganic cyborg parts created, and what damage might their aims thus do? Any cyborg worth his or her weight as an ecologically aware posthuman must aim for sustainable ethically sourced options in becoming cyborg, lest they risk undermining their entire ethos for more ethical interspecies interactions. Word Count: 2618 (with footnotes) 33 34 Downey, Dumit and Williams, ‘Cyborg Anthropology,’ 345. 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