Date: Mon, 10 Dec 2001 22:53:39 -0600
Subject: Re: more on cyborgs and the inhuman


steve.devos wrote:

> When I (re-)opened this thread on 'more on cyborgs and the inhuman' I
> was conscious that the use of the couplet maddox/lyotard would
> probably not be addressed since the utopian ideal that maddox places
> in the frame - that the 'cyborg' becomes human is precisely contary to
> the predominant utopian belief that the cyborg functions as an
> anti-totalising image. The other element that has not been addressed
> is why Lyotard is so strongly anti-inhuman and what it gives us as an
> approach that notions like the cyborg do not.

Steve,

First of all who is maddox?

Second, it is too late tonight to go into the point you raise, but I am
certainly will to go into it further. Lyotard, as you say, can be seen
as "strongly anti-inhuman, but he is certainly not a Luddite. There are
pieces in his writings such as the notion of inscription,
experimentalism in the arts, the notion of the arts as somehow extending
our nodes of perception, the critique of Heidegger, the role of thinking
etc that are worth exploring in relation to these issues.

I will attempt to expand later on some of these. For tonight, however,
the only thought I want to leave you with is this. I don't see the
cyborg in the same frame you are using.  I want to develop the concept
of the cyborg into a non-essentialist kind of antropology, if you will.
Such an antropology would see language as central in the way Lyotard
describes universe of phrazes. It is not simply that language is a tool
in the way of a hammer.  It is more like the shell extruded by a crab.  
This is the sense of the cyborg I am getting at.

eric