File spoon-archives/lyotard.archive/lyotard_2002/lyotard.0203, message 31


Date: Sat, 23 Mar 2002 14:47:25 -0500
From: shawn wilbur <swilbur-AT-wcnet.org>
Subject: Re: [Fwd: [CSL]: At Airport Gate, a Cyborg Unplugged]


"steve.devos" wrote:

> Shawn
>
> It is simply not possible for us to have a discussion founded on and
> around statements that suggest that there are good cyborgs and bad
> cyborgs. The people and non-human sentient beings I share my life with
> are not cyborgs and the term is simply not useful.

Oh, bullshit. It is certainly possible to discuss it. Your unwillingness to
do so doesn't change that a bit. The term "cyborg" has, of course, been
useful to others, myself included, and your denials of that
utility-to-others - along with your willingness to distort and misread folks
like Haraway and myself - suggest a sort of narrow absolutism that i suspect
makes many sorts of discussion impossible. Lyotard quite clearly deals with
two sorts of "the inhuman" - and sees one as perhaps necessary in resistance
to the other. I certainly think that formulation is "adequate" - at
least as
a place to start - but it is clearly a formulation that you reject. I think
it would be pretty easy to show that, of the folks you cite below, at least
Lyotard, Deleuze and Guattari leave open - indeed require - a space for
something like the positive "inhuman" or "good cyborg."

Personally, i believe that attempts to close those spaces are as potentially
fascist as anything the extropian crowd can come up with. It is a common
enough attack against the poststructuralists that their work can be as
useful to the right as to the left, but this is only true to the extent that
the work is appropriated and recuperated to ignore the general, central
concern with the differend, with justice, with that which, in general,
resists totalization and totalitarianism.

Steve, you've made it clear that you aren't going to engage with the complex
nature of "the inhuman" in Lyotard - just as you will admit no possible
difference between, say, Haraway and Moravec. But i would have to say that
it is *not possible* to engage with Lyotard's work at all if you can't admit
that sort of complexity into the discussion.

It seems to me absolutely critical to come to terms with these more
challenging aspects of Lyotard's work. Either that, or we perhaps should
stop wasting our time with this forum.

-shawn

> The proposal that Bush and Blair need to be re-defined as bad cyborgs is
> unnecessary - Negri and Hardt, Deleuze and Guattari, Lyotard, Luxembourg
> have all at times, adequately defined such socio-political perspectives
> and the current globalisers are understood. I have made my position
> quite clear on this list and so far have seen no reason to change it...

> (incidentally lyotard's dates were all wrong the planet will beuninhabital
> in 1Bn years not 4.5Bn years as he imagined)

>
> s
>
> shawn wilbur wrote:
>
> >Steve,
> >
> >I do not "disagree" with Lyotard. Our last exchange ended with a reading
> >of Lyotard much more ambiguous about the "inhuman" - and, thus, i have
> >argued, about the "cyborg" (since neither are all of a piece) - than you
> >have characterized him. Lyotard seems really straightforward in his
> >assertion that while a certain manifestation of "the inhuman" is that
> >which must be resisted at all costs, it is another such manifestation
> >that is, perhaps, our only source of defense. Haraway's use of the
> >figure of "the cyborg" has very much the same character.
> >
> >There are apparently several different concerns being addressed in this
> >exchange. The question of "security" - airport guards protecting us from
> >terrorist threats, and what this means for individual liberties - is
> >certainly one of them. If the airport guards who denied the cybernetics
> >researcher access to the plane - and, apparently, roughed him up a bit
> >in the process - were "doing their job," then presumably there is some
> >evidence in his appearance that, despite his credentials, he actually
> >posed some sort of terrorist threat. It is not the airport guards' job
> >to protect humanity from the inhuman. In fact, as part of the
> >military-security apparatus that is spreading its reach into new aspects
> >of daily life all the time, they might be considered very much on the
> >side of the (bad) inhuman. Perhaps you think the researcher's choice of
> >research somehow annuls his basic rights and liberties. I'm not
> >particularly concerned with that question *in this context*. This seems
> >to me like yet another instance of overzealous cop behavior, with the
> >"cyborg" element simply another shade of the
> >nonconformist-thus-dangerous.
> >
> >I say all of this while maintaining - perhaps more consistently than you
> >- an opposition to the state-cyborg apparatus that Bush, Blair and their
> >ilk are currently riding over what, i take it, ought to be basic human
> >freedoms on a global scale.If there is a "humanity" that must be
> >defended, then i think we're going to have to extract it - perhaps build
> >it (not rediscover, and i hesitate to say "rebuild" since i think there
> >is no essense or origin to which we can simply return) - from the rather
> >mixed bad that we all are at present.
> >
> >As to how we are to be protected from any of these bad-cyborg
> >institutions, whether scientific, military, governmental, or whatever,
> >it seems to me that the fine old core of socialism - a materialist
> >science of society, social struggle based on this sort of analysis,
> >together with a rigorous attention to the perhaps unanswerable but
> >vitally important question of social justice - remains about our only
> >hope. If we are to place some basic principle above all others, it seems
> >to me that liberty or justice would be a better one to choose - one more
> >likely to result in something like real security - than safety. Of
> >course, any movement towards a "liberty" or "justice" beyond the tired
> >excuses for tyranny which those ideas have so often become will
> >undoubtedly involve a struggle to transvalue then, as, i have been
> >arguing - and i think Lyotard suggests - the "inhuman" might be
> >struggled for as well as with.
> >
> >I'll take Nietzche over Dubya when it comes to questions of "good and
> >evil."
> >
> >-shawn
> >
> >

   

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