File spoon-archives/lyotard.archive/lyotard_2002/lyotard.0203, message 40


From: "fuller" <fuller-AT-bekkers.com.au>
Subject: Re: DEFINITIONS:  Re: [Fwd: [CSL]: At Airport Gate, a Cyborg Unplugged]
Date: Mon, 25 Mar 2002 14:07:15 +0800


This is a multi-part message in MIME format.


G'day,
I know this may be obvious... but, for the sake of discussion (if you think there is some benefit) can we please make a distinction between Steve's cyborg, the actual melding of organic and technical inorganic material in some intelligent system, and Shawn's Cyborg, a broader term, encompassing the cyborg (of Steve), used to describe a subjectivity within a system where there is a blurring of boundaries between 'tool' (previously object) and 'user' (ditto subject), for whatever 'tool' is being played with (haha), be it an actual cybernetic prothesis, a word, etc. The politics of both are similiar, but only in an abstract sense dealing with power and authority, authenticity, desire, etc.
I think both Cyborg and cyborg as distinct, but related (perhaps Cyborg?:) terms have their uses, Steve? Shawn?

Glen. 
  ----- Original Message -----
  From: steve.devos
  To: lyotard-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu
  Sent: Monday, March 25, 2002 4:38 AM
  Subject: Re: DEFINITIONS: Re: [Fwd: [CSL]: At Airport Gate, a Cyborg Unplugged]


  Mal

  ah - but for me it is juridical and deliberative - I want legal restrictions on the builders of cyborgs - its a necessary social and political struggle.

  s

  Matthew A. Levy wrote:

    The cyborg is not a techno-science object.  That's the value:  No subject.  No object. 

    It seems to me that the only point in insisting upon the "human" as part of the cyborg is to prop up the binary human vs. animal.  I don't see how it is useful to do that.  Though, I guess I shouldn't have begrudged you your definitional fetish.  Knock yourself out. 

    Your proposal that by establishing and building upon definitions we are going to accomplish something is delusional.  There would have to be some kind of political structure that would respond to our definitions.  For instance, arguing about what "assault" is could be useful because the term as defined this way or that way has significance in the legal system, which "turns" on such "turns."  The discourse of cyborgism is not that kind of system.  It is ethical and poetic, not juridical or deliberative.

    over AND OUT,
    mal
      Mal

      You may be right about the philosopher element, but in this case it is also my engineering/techno-science engagement which rebels against a notion which only includes and does not exclude.  It's common in cybernetics and systems engineering to use the phrase 'black box' whenever a techno-science object becomes either too complex or so commonly understood that a commonly accepted 'black box' is allowable - for example until Einstein, it had been accepted by science that Newtonian physics was a black box. Einstein came along and prised open the black box and rearranged the contents. Within this understanding in place of the true complexity of a techno-science area a small box is drawn about which nothing is needed to be understood but the boxes inputs and outputs.  The machine on which I type this sentence is a typical cybernetics black box which has been constructed out of a series of other black boxes.  If a techno-science concept cannot be understood as a black box is it defined enough to even have a common understanding? It's my slightly extreme proposition that the use of the term Cyborg has little value when used outside of the definition of a 'cyborg is the fusion of human being and machine'. 

      Actually this computer, the medical science that enabled my cat to have a vaccination are sufficently understood as concepts, as black boxes that we can discuss the concepts and agree and dissagree about them. As such it's possible to imagine having an intelligent discussion about religious sects that dissagree with vaccination or statistics about the safety of vaccination etc. However it isn't possible for me and Shawn to have a discussion about what constitutes a cyborg because the black boxes are so completely different. I believe - because of my techno-science bias that a cyborg is solely the fusion of human being and machine...

      If by border dwelling entity you consider the above understanding of  the cyborg as acceptable - then it is possible to fine tune the cyborg 'black box' to discuss whether we gain anything by restrospectively incorporating vacccination  or the implantation of a pacemaker into the human body as sufficient to define the recipient as 'cyborg'.  I don't think we do I believe a more restricted black box definition is more useful. Moreover if you are suggesting that Bessie the cat is a cyborg because of its being vaccinated, or that Blair is a 'bad cyborg' rather than just being a proponent of the Empire, in my view you are simply suggesting another unnecessary paradigm which gets us knowhere.

      regards
      steve

      Matthew A. Levy wrote:

        Steve,

        You are too much a philosopher.  Why does something have to NOT be a cyborg for the term to be useful?  Can a term only name and distinguish---negate?  What if becoming-cyborg doesn't spare anyone-anything?  We can still consider, fruitfully I think, what it means to take technology seriously and not just as something that must be put at a distance from the "human."  To begin with, the idea of the cyborg, as a border-dwelling entity, can help get the monkey of definition off our backs.

        mal



        ----- Original Message -----
          From: steve.devos
          To: lyotard-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu
          Sent: Sunday, March 24, 2002 9:46 AM
          Subject: Re: [Fwd: [CSL]: At Airport Gate, a Cyborg Unplugged]


          Shawn

          I don't have any particular problem with the concept of 'cyborg' as such - I just reject the loose notion of what constitutes a cyborg that Gray and yourself have. We can't discuss it because we've tried and you can't accept a boundary around the concept. You have stated that my cat because of its injection is a cyborg. A concept that broad is simply not something I can understand. Supply a boundary to the concept of cyborg that is understandable and mutually agreeable and we can discuss its relationship to the 'inhuman'.

          >From my domestic cat, through Bush, a hapless security guard, to the supplanting of humanity by half-machines/hulf human, through to machine intelligences is simply a cyborg to far...

          As for the 'good inhuman' and the 'bad inhuman'  - define it then if you feel that it's a necessary concept.

          regards
          s

          shawn wilbur wrote:

"steve.devos" wrote:
ShawnIt is simply not possible for us to have a discussion founded on andaround statements that suggest that there are good cyborgs and badcyborgs. The people and non-human sentient beings I share my life withare not cyborgs and the term is simply not useful.
Oh, bullshit. It is certainly possible to discuss it. Your unwillingness todo so doesn't change that a bit. The term "cyborg" has, of course, beenuseful to others, myself included, and your denials of thatutility-to-others - along with your willingness to distort and misread folkslike Haraway and myself - suggest a sort of narrow absolutism that i suspectmakes many sorts of discussion impossible. Lyotard quite clearly deals withtwo sorts of "the inhuman" - and sees one as perhaps necessary in resistanceto the other. I certainly think that formulation is "adequate" - atleast asa place to start - but it is clearly a formulation that you reject. I thinkit would be pretty easy to show that, of the folks you cite below, at leastLyotard, Deleuze and Guattari leave open - indeed require - a space forsomething like the positive "inhuman" or "good cyborg."Personally, i believe that attempts to
 close those spaces are as potentiallyfascist as anything the extropian crowd can come up with. It is a commonenough attack against the poststructuralists that their work can be asuseful to the right as to the left, but this is only true to the extent thatthe work is appropriated and recuperated to ignore the general, centralconcern 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 complexnature of "the inhuman" in Lyotard - just as you will admit no possibledifference between, say, Haraway and Moravec. But i would have to say thatit is *not possible* to engage with Lyotard's work at all if you can't admitthat sort of complexity into the discussion.It seems to me absolutely critical to come to terms with these morechallenging 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 isunnecessary - Negri and Hardt, Deleuze and Guattari, Lyotard, Luxembourghave all at times, adequately defined such socio-political perspectivesand the current globalisers are understood. I have made my positionquite clear on this list and so far have seen no reason to change it...

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

sshawn wilbur wrote:
Steve,I do not "disagree" with Lyotard. Our last exchange ended with a readingof Lyotard much more ambiguous about the "inhuman" - and, thus, i haveargued, about the "cyborg" (since neither are all of a piece) - than youhave characterized him. Lyotard seems really straightforward in hisassertion that while a certain manifestation of "the inhuman" is thatwhich must be resisted at all costs, it is another such manifestationthat is, perhaps, our only source of defense. Haraway's use of thefigure of "the cyborg" has very much the same character.There are apparently several different concerns being addressed in thisexchange. The question of "security" - airport guards protecting us fromterrorist threats, and what this means for individual liberties - iscertainly one of them. If the airport guards who denied the cyberneticsresearcher access to the plane - and, apparently, roughed him up a
bit<br>in the process - were "doing their job," then presumably there is someevidence in his appearance that, despite his credentials, he actuallyposed some sort of terrorist threat. It is not the airport guards' jobto protect humanity from the inhuman. In fact, as part of themilitary-security apparatus that is spreading its reach into new aspectsof daily life all the time, they might be considered very much on theside of the (bad) inhuman. Perhaps you think the researcher's choice ofresearch somehow annuls his basic rights and liberties. I'm notparticularly concerned with that question *in this context*. This seemsto me like yet another instance of overzealous cop behavior, with the"cyborg" element simply another shade of thenonconformist-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 theirilk are
 currently riding over what, i take it, ought to be basic humanfreedoms on a global scale.If there is a "humanity" that must bedefended, then i think we're going to have to extract it - perhaps buildit (not rediscover, and i hesitate to say "rebuild" since i think thereis no essense or origin to which we can simply return) - from the rathermixed bad that we all are at present.As to how we are to be protected from any of these bad-cyborginstitutions, whether scientific, military, governmental, or whatever,it seems to me that the fine old core of socialism - a materialistscience of society, social struggle based on this sort of analysis,together with a rigorous attention to the perhaps unanswerable butvitally important question of social justice - remains about our onlyhope. If we are to place some basic principle above all others, it seemsto me that liberty or justice would be a better one to choose - one more
likely to result in something like real security - than safety. Ofcourse, any movement towards a "liberty" or "justice" beyond the tiredexcuses for tyranny which those ideas have so often become willundoubtedly involve a struggle to transvalue then, as, i have beenarguing - and i think Lyotard suggests - the "inhuman" might bestruggled for as well as with.I'll take Nietzche over Dubya when it comes to questions of "good andevil."-shawn








HTML VERSION:

G'day,
I know this may be obvious... but, for the sake of discussion (if you think there is some benefit) can we please make a distinction between Steve's cyborg, the actual melding of organic and technical inorganic material in some intelligent system, and Shawn's Cyborg, a broader term, encompassing the cyborg (of Steve), used to describe a subjectivity within a system where there is a blurring of boundaries between 'tool' (previously object) and 'user' (ditto subject), for whatever 'tool' is being played with (haha), be it an actual cybernetic prothesis, a word, etc. The politics of both are similiar, but only in an abstract sense dealing with power and authority, authenticity, desire, etc. 
I think both Cyborg and cyborg as distinct, but related (perhaps Cyborg?:) terms have their uses, Steve? Shawn?
 
Glen.  
----- Original Message -----
From: steve.devos
To: lyotard-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu
Sent: Monday, March 25, 2002 4:38 AM
Subject: Re: DEFINITIONS: Re: [Fwd: [CSL]: At Airport Gate, a Cyborg Unplugged]

Mal

ah - but for me it is juridical and deliberative - I want legal restrictions on the builders of cyborgs - its a necessary social and political struggle.

s

Matthew A. Levy wrote:
The cyborg is not a techno-science object.  That's the value:  No subject.  No object. 
 
It seems to me that the only point in insisting upon the "human" as part of the cyborg is to prop up the binary human vs. animal.  I don't see how it is useful to do that.  Though, I guess I shouldn't have begrudged you your definitional fetish.  Knock yourself out. 
 
Your proposal that by establishing and building upon definitions we are going to accomplish something is delusional.  There would have to be some kind of political structure that would respond to our definitions.  For instance, arguing about what "assault" is could be useful because the term as defined this way or that way has significance in the legal system, which "turns" on such "turns."  The discourse of cyborgism is not that kind of system.  It is ethical and poetic, not juridical or deliberative.
 
over AND OUT,
mal
Mal

You may be right about the philosopher element, but in this case it is also my engineering/techno-science engagement which rebels against a notion which only includes and does not exclude.  It's common in cybernetics and systems engineering to use the phrase 'black box' whenever a techno-science object becomes either too complex or so commonly understood that a commonly accepted 'black box' is allowable - for example until Einstein, it had been accepted by science that Newtonian physics was a black box. Einstein came along and prised open the black box and rearranged the contents. Within this understanding in place of the true complexity of a techno-science area a small box is drawn about which nothing is needed to be understood but the boxes inputs and outputs.  The machine on which I type this sentence is a typical cybernetics black box which has been constructed out of a series of other black boxes.  If a techno-science concept cannot be understood as a black box is it defined enough to even have a common understanding? It's my slightly extreme proposition that the use of the term Cyborg has little value when used outside of the definition of a 'cyborg is the fusion of human being and machine'.  

Actually this computer, the medical science that enabled my cat to have a vaccination are sufficently understood as concepts, as black boxes that we can discuss the concepts and agree and dissagree about them. As such it's possible to imagine having an intelligent discussion about religious sects that dissagree with vaccination or statistics about the safety of vaccination etc. However it isn't possible for me and Shawn to have a discussion about what constitutes a cyborg because the black boxes are so completely different. I believe - because of my techno-science bias that a cyborg is solely the fusion of human being and machine...

If by border dwelling entity you consider the above understanding of  the cyborg as acceptable - then it is possible to fine tune the cyborg 'black box' to discuss whether we gain anything by restrospectively incorporating vacccination  or the implantation of a pacemaker into the human body as sufficient to define the recipient as 'cyborg'.  I don't think we do I believe a more restricted black box definition is more useful. Moreover if you are suggesting that Bessie the cat is a cyborg because of its being vaccinated, or that Blair is a 'bad cyborg' rather than just being a proponent of the Empire, in my view you are simply suggesting another unnecessary paradigm which gets us knowhere.

regards
steve

Matthew A. Levy wrote:
Steve,
 
You are too much a philosopher.  Why does something have to NOT be a cyborg for the term to be useful?  Can a term only name and distinguish---negate?  What if becoming-cyborg doesn't spare anyone-anything?  We can still consider, fruitfully I think, what it means to take technology seriously and not just as something that must be put at a distance from the "human."  To begin with, the idea of the cyborg, as a border-dwelling entity, can help get the monkey of definition off our backs.
 
mal
 
 
 
----- Original Message -----
Sent: Sunday, March 24, 2002 9:46 AM
Subject: Re: [Fwd: [CSL]: At Airport Gate, a Cyborg Unplugged]

Shawn

I don't have any particular problem with the concept of 'cyborg' as such - I just reject the loose notion of what constitutes a cyborg that Gray and yourself have. We can't discuss it because we've tried and you can't accept a boundary around the concept. You have stated that my cat because of its injection is a cyborg. A concept that broad is simply not something I can understand. Supply a boundary to the concept of cyborg that is understandable and mutually agreeable and we can discuss its relationship to the 'inhuman'.

>From my domestic cat, through Bush, a hapless security guard, to the supplanting of humanity by half-machines/hulf human, through to machine intelligences is simply a cyborg to far...

As for the 'good inhuman' and the 'bad inhuman'  - define it then if you feel that it's a necessary concept.

regards
s

shawn wilbur wrote:
"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 clo
se t
hose 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 was
ting 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<
br>i
n 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 rid
ing 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 i
n 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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