Date: Fri, 20 May 1994 14:58:47 -0500 (CDT)
Subject: Re: relevant questions
To: baudrillard-AT-world.std.com


Hello.  I'm newto this list, so perhaps I'm jumping in with
old stuff, but I don't think that the difference between "us" and
"our machines" is something we know, but something that is asserted--
for various purposes.  I'm thinking of Donna Haraway's "Cyborg manifesto"
which ends: "[Cyborg imagery] means both building ad destroying machines,
identities, categories, relationships, space stories.  Though both are
bound in the spiral dance, I would rather be a cyborg than a goddess."
I suppose I'd turn around Beth B's comment that "Conversation in
this space tens in that direction [of not knowing the difference
between ourselves and our interlocutors] because of its disembodied
nature, and suggest that the disembodied nature of post-enlightenment
being (if not before) is constantly being discovered: The book, the
periodical, the movie, the cartoon are all technologies that express
a disembodiment already figured in the way in which bodies, once
deployed as signs, are agents of disembodiment.

Sorry about the spelling and punctuation of the above--can't do muchmited
editing...
Mark Schoenfield
schoenml-AT-ctrvax.vanderbilt.edu