Cyborg Context
Territories of Digital Theory
The current field of research on digital technology tends to focus on the effects of technology in a singular area of society and theory. From the optimistic artists and commentators of the 1990s to the more recent socio-cultural applications of digital theory, there is a disparate canon of the digital that is often entrenched in earlier debates from pre-existing fields. It was earlier techno-enthusiasts such as Heim (1993) and Negroponte (1996) who made the most radical steps towards a philosophy of the digital in-itself, yet they remained speculative, superficial and sanguine in their analyses, focusing on the changes within the technologies themselves as an external material shift, rather than on the socio-cultural evolution occurring within increasingly cybernetic consciousness. More elaborate and influential theories are often based in issues of conventional media, particularly cinema and photography (Sutton et al. 2007), which, limiting the analysis of the digital to its effects on these prior media fields, appears unconcerned with a philosophy of the digital as such. Approaching the digital as a mere extension of pre-existing media creates an instant barrier towards new modes of interactivity. Now an outdated termâhaving passed through its obverse of interpassivity and into notions of immersive art and alternative, freer modes of engagementâit is the inclusion of interactivity in conventional media that motivates many ânew mediaâ theories (Manovich 2001). By contrast, the sustained antagonism between different perspectives has been developed by some within the field of digital art practice as the necessarily âsyncreticâ nature of an interdisciplinary cybernetics, whereby the state of âbeing bothâ is emphasised over the binary opposition of physical and digital media (Ascott 2005). This syncretic state can be compared to what is, in this book, developed ontologically in the parallax relation of consciousness between physical and digital realities that forms cybernetic subjectivity.
The inherent role of consciousness in engagement with technology thus remains to be fully theorised. Much work on the digital discusses the importance of our relation to the technology only implicitly (Creeber and Martin 2009, p. 4), rather than drawing it into full view as the focus of the debate. Even the term ânew mediaâ detracts from the differences between physical and digital modes of consciousness on the grounds that the effects of digital culture often predate digital technology (Siapera 2012, pp. 3â6). While emphasising the blurred lines of our relation to the digital, such a stance fails to engage fully with the effect of the digital on consciousness. The relation of the digital to consciousness necessarily predates the proliferation or even existence of digital technology, as the shift has not been a single instantaneous event in which society transitioned from physical in one moment to digital in the next, but a process within consciousness that has allowed the digital as such to manifest. The term ânew mediaâ has been perhaps most prominently emphasised by Manovich (2001), whose background in film governs the framework of his discussion and definition of the term. A direct concern with the digital as a new space for consciousness is thus replaced by the more clear and limited effects of digital technology on established film media theory, transposing existing languages onto digital media even amidst the claim for the necessity of a new language. Highlighting the ideological connotations of the term regarding notions of progress (Lister et al. 2003, p. 11) suggests a view of ânew mediaâ under which the technology is causal with secondary cultural relations, rather than exploring the causality of culture as an effect of consciousness in the intertwined relations of the digital with contemporary subjectivity that have allowed the technology to emerge. Even those who acknowledge the importance of the digital in contemporary discourses (Thurlow and Mroczek 2011) tend towards the presentation of a single theoretical application (for example, Thurlow and Mroczekâs sociolinguistics of media) rather than a confrontation with the digital in itself or in direct relation to consciousness. The aim of this book will therefore be an interdisciplinary approach in the scope of both its theoretical context and application, employing conceptual frameworks as tools to develop a new mode of viewing and critiquing the cyborg subject and its place in contemporary, technologically-mediated reality.
The problematic relation of consciousness to the world is not only of relevance in digital technology. Aside from the long history of the philosophy of mind that has dominated Western thought since Descartes, at the beginning of the twentieth century science had already unearthed the seeds of tension between the appearance of the material world and the role of consciousness in the causal processes that underpin it. Quantum physics, with its focus on wave/particle duality, disrupts classical notions of our relation to the physical world, moving beyond the subject-object separation towards the causal function of consciousness in collapsing the wave function and creating the appearance of matter. This notion remains pertinent and divisive within science. While digital and cultural theory often use quantum physical concepts as illustrative of hidden processesâsuch as in the case of Sholette (2011), who provides only a brief, vague and highly allegorical framing in terms of contemporary physics before returning firmly to his established field of the politics of artâthere is a gap within theories of the digital across which the active role of consciousness seldom penetrates. This resistance to the fluidity of a causal consciousness in the construction of worlds is seen in the increasing emphasis on a materialism of the digital, entrenching the formerly immaterial realm into notions of embodiment and inert mass.
The Cyborg Reconsidered
Here is where the context of the term âcyborgâ must be confronted, in opposition to the prevailing image of prosthesis and its extension by Haraway (1985). While her work made an important shift away from the solidity of essentialist identities towards a fluid and engaged cyborg, the framing of her discussion under explicitly socialist-feminist terms (see its inclusion in Haraway 1991) places a boundary of pre-existing social power relations upon cyborg consciousness. This enforces the materialist conception of embodiment that impedes a full assessment of the subject as the relations of consciousness to physical and digital worlds, by relating cyborgs only as a resistant political Other against dominant ideologies rather than as Other to itself in the void of subjectivity. Don Ihde also acknowledges the need for reciprocity between rapidly changing technology and a corresponding philosophy for understanding and reflection (Ihde 2012, p. 331), but undertakes this project in a somewhat narrow conception of cybernetics as prosthesis, ignoring the need for a reciprocal change in philosophy between technology and consciousness across physical and digital realities. He thus emphasises the digital as a technological mediation of closeness, following a phenomenological approach that echoes what he hails in Harawayâs emphasis on biology. Outside of the lost fetish of physicality in prosthetic conceptions of the cyborg, cyberspace in itself emerges as a creative alternative space with which consciousness can engage, not merely a tool for communicating across vast distances or simulating a lost physical reality. This difficulty in relinquishing conventional notions of embodiment even in their explicit critique can also be seen in the digital arts; for example, the contributions in Mary Anne Moserâs collection (1996) that enforce the role of the physical body as a limiting factor on the experience of consciousness, or the work of Kozel (2007), whose practice as a performance artist focuses her entire theoretical framework around her own body and its relation to external worlds. While these works and others take important steps towards problematising embodiment, the focus on the materiality of the digital further obscures its relation to consciousness.
Katherine Hayles aligns the cyborg with a posthuman stage of evolution, stating that âthe defining characteristics involve the construction of subjectivity, not the presence of nonbiological componentsâ (Hayles 1999, p. 4). While this establishes the subject as the centre of discussion, it risks reducing cybernetics to the prosthetics of physical loss rather than an extension of consciousness itself, and becomes mired in an obsession with reinserting embodiment against the posthuman view of embodiment as the primary physical prosthesis of human consciousness. While Hayles (2005) later recognised the need for an array of potential posthumans, she shifted the discussion once more into a form of embodiment through a materiality of information in digital technologies, rather than into the consciousness of parallax that defines our manner of overcoming the relation between the physical-digital antagonism within the subject itself. This emphasis on materiality arises in part from a misconception of Virtuality, which she defines as âthe cultural perception that material objects are interpenetrated by informationâ (Hayles 1999, p. 13). In this book the Virtual is rather the process by which consciousness creates the subject, with the simultaneous appearance of materiality and its structures of signification. It was not until recently that Hayles emphasised the need to acknowledge the shift in perspective of subjects thinking with digital technology, arriving at the position where âmateriality, like the object itself, is not a pregiven entity but rather a dynamic process that changes as the focus of attention shiftsâ (Hayles 2012, p. 14). What appears to hint towards ontological parallax remains within the specific context of comparative media studies and the impact of technology on scholarly activity. However, the limitations of embodiment linger with discussions of embodied artefacts and informational node bodies (Hayles 2010, p. 328; 2012, p. 15). In a parallax model of the split between human and cyborg modes of thought, it is the spaces between that are of importance, and their shifting positions that come to define the ânodesâ of physical and digital worlds that the subjectâs consciousness might inhabit.
Mark Hansen appears to make some progress in establishing the emerging need to discuss not separate physical and digital spaces, but rather fluid and mixed spaces and realities, yet remains limited by the centrality of the body as the originary interface of human consciousness in negotiating Virtuality (Hansen 2006, p. 2). This is based on the same error as that of Hayles and Ihde in defining the Virtual as a filling of (physical) space with information rather than as the functioning process of consciousness (or/as computation) between spaces. Hansen does, however, emphasise the importance of functions in a mixed reality, yet returns again to the familiar paradigm of embodied ontology in a return to pretechnological (prereproduction) conceptions of the auric indelibility of the body as an experiential actualisation of data (Hansen 2004, p. 3). While Hansen views embodiment as inseparable from cognitive neural processes, this too reduces the entire consciousness of the subject to a materiality of the physical body. We must move towards a functional approach to consciousness in itself if these theories of re-embodiment are to be redisembodied. Only by stepping outside of any situated bodily space can the parallax perspective of the void of subjectivity emerge for critical confrontation.
Anna Munster also makes a purposeful effort to reinsert the body and affect into the digital, placing the Virtual as a part of materiality rather than a force in relation to consciousness. Her focus on the intersections of digital flows and physical bodies (Munster 2006, p. 24) remains entrenched within materiality. There is a clear Deleuzian influence in Munsterâs work, and both Deleuze and FĂ©lix Guattari are referenced heavily in relation to the Virtual, as well as notions of flow, diagram and time. Indeed it is the work of Deleuze that is placed in this book alongside the philosophy of quantum physics within the framework of ĆœiĆŸekâs parallax to interrogate the cyborg subject in relation to the gap between physical and digital worlds under the terms of a series of functions of consciousness. This is in part an attempt to confront a common thread throughout the history of digital theory: a failure to fully address the role of the subject amidst the increasing digitisation of the world. However, such works remain instructive for introducing the relevant questions and problems within scholarly discussion of the digital. For example, Sherry Turkle highlights the contemporary rift between theory and lived experience, between the self as both illusion and fundamental reality (Turkle 1997, p. 15), drawing notions of digital consciousness into the dilemma of modern physics. Similarly, Baudrillard challenges the primacy of the very idea of objective reality, on the grounds that it hold such a firm place in theory simply due to being the simplest solution and the most easily reconciled with common sense experience (Baudrillard 2005, p. 47). The position presented in this book aligns itself with these negotiations of digital technology that have established antagonisms within the relations of embodiment and objective reality and against the materialist insistence on the physical that dominates current scholarship, using cultural theory to analyse the expressions and impact of the digital and consciousness studies to confront the relation of the digital to the contemporary subject. In a reflexive turn, looking further back in order to look further forward, this will necessitate the reappearance of earlier conceptions of cybernetics as an interdisciplinary pursuit for the expansion of human intellect (Ashby 1957; Licklider 1960; Engelbart 1962), a study of our cognitive behaviour and its relation to conceptual and technological processes. To reconsider the cyborg subject thus necessitates a discussion of the internal psychological and metaphysical processes that construct and mediate the parallax gap between physical and digital realms.
Nusselder (2012) has reinserted the need to view cybernetics in terms of cognitive processes, acknowledging the important role of consciousness as its own self-mediating interface, the psychological effects of an approach that foregrounds the internal mechanisms of the individual subject, and a scepticism regarding realism in the wake of digital technologies. Building on Lacanâs own discussion of the links between cybernetics and psychoanalytical models (Lacan 1988, pp. 295f), Nusselder offers a thorough rendition of one possible application (or p...