The Enlightenment Cyborg (9/15/02; ISECS, 8/3/03-8/10/03)
I invite proposals for the following session at the upcoming ISECS
Eleventh Quadrennial Congress in Los Angeles 3-10 August 2003
(http://www.isecs.ucla.edu/). Please send abstracts to
allison.muri@shaw.ca or to:
Dr. Allison Muri
Department of English
Chester New Hall 321
McMaster University
1280 Main Street West
Hamilton, Ontario, Canada
L8S 4L9
Session title: "The Enlightenment Cyborg: The Human-Machine in Early
Modern Science and Literature"
Just as recent studies of the cyborg have failed to explore in any depth
its important historical antecedents prior to the mid 20th-century,
studies of the Enlightenment "man-machine" trope have failed to address
the need for a history of the cyborg. That is, while numerous
Enlightenment histories of the mind-body problem and of mechanical
technology have been written, very few scholars have considered these
together as constituting a history of the human-machine hybrid known as
the cyborg.
The study of the cyborg as both fictional and social construct has
become prevalent since Donna Haraway claimed the cybernetic organism as
an "ironic political myth" and a dissolution of the "binaries" that have
dominated our culture since before Descartes. While studies of the
cyborg may point to Descartes' mind-body dualism, however, the dominant
assumption of cultural theorists has been that the cyborg has little or
no history of note prior to its "being spat out of the womb-brain of its
war-besotted parents in the middle of the last century of the Second
Christian Millennium" (Haraway 1997). For many theorists, the
human-machine interface signals the postmodern, postindustrial,
post-Enlightenment, post-nature, post-gender, or post-human culture of
the late 20th century, and its history begins with Norbert Weiner's 1948
neologism "cybernetics" to describe the fusion of organism, machine, and
feedback mechanism. There is currently no history of the intellectual
premises prior to the mid 20th-century that would eventually converge in
the cultural construct known as the cyborg-an organism both engineered
and programmed, uniting the organic, the mechanical, and the written.
The important early-modern questions about the man-machine comprised
materialist debates over such issues as production, reproduction, the
soul, and individual autonomy, and these have provided historical
antecedents for the "postmodern" cyborg as a highly politicised trope
for feminist, socialist, and conservative agendas alike. This panel
invites proposals which examine the ways in which these coordinates
originate in the early Modern period.
Allison Muri can also be reached at:
306-664-4515
allison@headlesschicken.ca
http://www.headlesschicken.ca/allison
