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a. Link: The aff affirms the reasons we have to be afraid of new technology.
They fail to recognize that we are already becoming cyborgs in todays
control society
Wittes and Chong 14 [Benjamin, senior fellow in Governance Studies at The Brookings Institution, co-founded and is the editor-inchief of the Lawfare blog, and Jane, 2014 graduate of Yale Law School, where she was an editor of the Yale Law Journal, Our Cyborg Future: Law and
Policy Implications, September 2014, Brookings Institution, http://www.brookings.edu/research/reports2/2014/09/cyborg-future-law-policyimplications] //khirn
There is, however, another way to think about all of this: what
try to take Wus challenge seriously and think about how the law will respond as the divide between human and machine becomes ever-more unstable.
We survey a variety of areas in which the law will have to respond as we become more cyborg-like. In particular, we consider how the law of surveillance
will shift as we develop from humans who use machines into humans who partially are machines or, at least, who depend on machines pervasively for
our most human-like activities. We proceed in a number of steps. First, we try to usefully define cyborgs and examine the question of to what extent
modern humans represent an early phase of cyborg development. Next we turn to a number of controversiessome of them social, some of them legal
that have arisen as the process of cyborgization has gotten under way. Lastly, we take an initial stab at identifying key facets of life among cyborgs,
looking in particular at the surveillance context and the stress that cyborgization is likely to put on modern Fourth Amendment laws so-called thirdparty doctrinethe idea that transactional data voluntarily given to third parties is not protected by the guarantee against unreasonable search and
seizure. What Is a Cyborg and Are We Already Cyborgs? Human fascination with man-machine hybrids spans centuries and civilizations.12 From this
rich history we extract two lineages of modern thought to help elucidate the theoretical underpinnings of the cyborg. In 1960, Manfred Clynes coined
the term cyborg13 for a paper he coauthored with Nathan Kline for a NASA conference on space exploration.14 As conceived by Clynes and Kline, the
cyborga portmanteau of cybernetics and organism15was not merely an amalgam of synthetic and organic parts. It represented, rather, a
particular approach to the technical challenges of space travelphysically adapting man to survive a hostile environment, rather than modifying the
environment alone.16 The proposal would prove influential. Soon after the publication of Clynes and Klines paper, NASA commissioned The Cyborg
Study. Released in 1963, the study was designed to assess the theoretical possibility of incorporating artificial organs, drugs, and/or hypothermia as
integral parts of the life support systems in space craft design of the future, and of reducing metabolic demands and the attendant life support
requirements.17 This sort of cyborg can be understood as a commitment to a larger project. As a self-regulating man-machine, the cyborg was
designed to provide an organization system in which . . . robot-like problems are taken care of automatically and unconsciously, leaving man free to
explore, to create, to think, and to feel.18 Distinguishing mans robot-like functions from the higher-order processes that rendered him uniquely
human, Clynes and Kline presented the cyborg as the realization of a concrete transhumanist goal: man liberated from the strictly mechanical (robotlike) limitations of his organism and the conditions of his environment by means of mechanization. Outside the realm of space exploration, use of the
term cyborg has evolved to encompass an expansive mesh of the mythological, metaphorical and technical.19 According to Chris Hables Gray, who
has written extensively on cyborgs and the politics of cyborgization, cyborg has become as specific, as general, as powerful, and as useless a term as
tool or machine.20 Perhaps because of its plasticity, the term has become more popular among science-fiction writers and political theorists than
we
are already cyborgsindeed, that we have always been cyborgshas been out there for some time. For example, in her
seminal 1991 feminist manifesto, Donna Haraway deployed the term for purposes of building
an ironic political myth, one that rejected the bright-line identity markers
purporting to separate human from animal, animal from machine . She famously declared,
[W]e are all chimeras, theorized and fabricated hybrids of machine and
organism; in short, we are cyborgs.22 Periodically repackaged as a radical idea, the claim has not remained confined to
among scientists, who prefer more exacting vocabulariesusing terms like biotelemetry, teleoperators, bionics and the like.21 The idea that
the figurative or sociopolitical realms. Technologists, too, have proposed that humans have already made the transition to cyborgs. In 1998, Andy Clark
and David Chalmers proposed that where the human organism is linked with an external entity in a two-way interaction the result is a coupled
My
body is an electronic virgin. I incorporate no silicon chips, no retinal or cochlear
implants, no pacemaker. I dont even wear glasses (though I do wear clothes), but I am slowly
becoming more and more a cyborg. So are you. Pretty soon, and still without the need for wires, surgery, or
bodily alterations, we shall all be kin to the Terminator, to Eve 8, to Cable . . . just fill in your favorite fictional cyborg. Perhaps
we already are. For we shall be cyborgs not in the merely superficial sense of
combining flesh and wires but in the more profound sense of being humantechnology symbionts: thinking and reasoning systems whose minds and selves are
system that can be seen as a cognitive system in its own right.23 Clark expanded on these ideas in his 2003 book Natural-Born Cyborgs:
spread across biological brain and nonbiological circuitry .24 We areif not yet Terminators
at least a little more integrated with our machines .
California at Berkeley in 1999, M.A. from the University of York, England, in Womens Studies in 1993, Jasbir Puar: Regimes of Surveillance,
Cosmologics, December 4, 2014, http://cosmologicsmagazine.com/jasbir-puar-regimes-of-surveillance] //khirn
We have seen, and continue to see, many examples of this post September 11th. The If You See Something, Say Something campaign
on NYC public transit interpellates the general public into service of the greater good; the NSEERS list impelled pre-emptive
repatriation (and sometimes migration to a country of origin that one had never been to) to South Asia and the Middle East; the
Turban Is Not a Hat campaign sought to educate Americans about the differences between Muslims and Sikhs by regulating the
distinctions between headwear, turbans, headscarves. Surveillance is not just about who the state is watching,
but about multiple circuits of collective surveillance : its not just about the act of seeing or
noticing or screening (bodies/identities), but also about acts of collecting, curating, and tabulating data and
affect. Surveillance doesnt just modulate between inner/outer or public/private, but rather upholds the fantasy that
these discrete realms exist, while working quite insidiously through networks of gaze, data, and
more. Even with forms of direct policing such as Stop and Frisk, the temporality of surveilling is not just
reactive, but also preemptive and increasingly, predictive. In surveillance studies, the notion of the
superpanoptic supplements the panoptic. The latter is a system through which the subject internalizes
the gaze of surveillance and the behavior of a docile body; the Superpanopticon , however, supplements
and sometimes precedes the Panopticon. It is a system through which data forms and announces the body, producing a
data body that may well show up before an actual body. After 9/11, the meme Flying While Brown
emerged in response to airport policies regarding Arab or Muslim-looking passengers and as a correlate to Driving
While Black. Flyers in U.S. with great compliance started throwing out their expensive toiletries and, since the shoe bomber
incident, taking off their shoes without reflection, a comment on the smooth inhabitation of new surveillance tactics.
This kind of connective analysis links various kinds of figures that emerge as targets of explicit
surveillance to the on-going systems of surveillance that bubble underneath . More recently, Global
Entry, TSA Pre, and other pay-as-you-go securitization programs allow you to pay for your status as a non-security risk or terrorist
threat. Im very interested in these forms of pay-as-you-go surveillance systems that neutralize you as a security risk. I think they
allow for new fissures in the informational superpanoptic to develop, as people like myself, who have traveled, for example, to
Pakistan, Lebanon, and Palestine, have nonetheless paid to be certified as non-risky travelers. The data body, composed of
information, of qualitative and quantitative metrics, supersedes the physical body. The data body does not replace the physical body,
but cuts in front of it, thus allowing a scrambling of class, race, and nation in particular.
Cosmologics: Writers have noted a shift in American surveillance after September 11th which in part refocused police efforts on
religious minorities. Could you speak a little more to this shift, and perhaps place it within a wider trajectory of surveillance in
America? Jasbir Puar: Much of the work in Terrorist Assemblages mapped out the dissolution of
public/private divides that have in the past animated feminist scholarship regarding the state
and state intrusion into the private. This private, as women of color and transnational
feminists have pointed out, has never quite existed given the level of state bureaucratic and
administrative presence in the households of immigrants and people of color . One interest of mine is
connecting the securitization upsurge that occurred after 9/11 with the formation of Homeland Security to both earlier and more
recent discourses of security that revolve around the home, and in particular the home as something private, national, and safe. So
before the War on Terror we had the War on Drugs: this rationalized policing in the name of
safe homes, in Black communities in particular. The War on Drugs no doubt provided a domestic
blueprint for the foreign deployment enacted after September 11th. This is one connective point to 9/11.
Another connective tissue to 9/11 is the financial crisis of 2008, which was not a break from the securitization of the home and
homeland, but a manifestation of one of its tactical failures, that of securing the home economically. I think 2008 marks the end of
the post 9/11 moment and re-complicates the Muslim terrorist as the predominate target of surveillance technologies and
discourses. Surveillance happensobliquely, but it happensthrough the instrument of the sub-prime
mortgage, whereby once again the security and safety of the home is determined through the
surveillance of those subjects deemed financially suspect. In this case, predominantly Black and Latino
populations were subject to foreclosures. Surveillance and securitization economies work through a
sort of monetization of ontologycertain bodies are intrinsically risky investments via a circular
logic of precarity whereby these bodies are set up as unable to take on risk in the very system that
produces them as risky. This kind of connective analysis links various kinds of figures that emerge as
targets of explicit surveillancein the case of 9/11, a religious figure, the fundamentalist terroristto the on-going
systems of surveillance that bubble underneath. One analysis that I offer in Terrorist Assemblages is the irony of the
decriminalization of sodomy in the Lawrence decision of 2004, a ruling that pivoted around the
privatization of anal (and thus homosexual) sex within the sanctity of the privately-owned home. This
was at a time when Homeland Security was requiring registration of men from Muslim
countries, infiltrating mosques, enacting home deportationsjust generally disrupting and
halting the construction of any kind of private home. One interpretation, then, of who exactly the Lawrence
decision protects is: not so much the lesbian or gay or homosexual or queer subject, but rather one whose
private home has no reason to be suspected and is not suspicious. The construction of
intimacy, as it is anchored in the private, becomes instrumentalized within the calculus of
biopolitics, a measure of ones worth to the state.
The democratization of surveillance through networks of control demands we pay even greater attention to the uneven distribution
of disciplining, punishment, and pleasure.
Cosmologics: What frameworks have you found the most compelling for understanding the experience of surveillance in ways more
sensitive to lived reality, especially given the many ways we ourselves participate in surveillance?
Jasbir Puar: I have always been bemused about the debates regarding social media and privacy. Outrage over the intrusion
of privacy practices on Facebook and Twitter erupt with regularity . But rather than merely expressing
discomfort and nostalgia about a long-gone protected realm of the private, these debates also obfuscate an
uncomfortable truth: that Facebook taps into our inner-stalker, taps into the pleasures we
revel in by surveilling others and by living out our own privates in public. There is a kind of
affective, technonationalist embrace of surveillance. So I think there is a conversation yet to be had
about pleasure and surveillance in relation to governmentality, policing, and biopolitics. This pleasure is both afforded and
sublimated in the directive to surveil on behalf of patriotism, the War on Terror, and America . Given the ubiquity
of
surveillance in our everyday liveswe think nothing of pulling out cell phones to capture on video any number of
events that may unexpectedly unfold in front of us, from car accidents to incidents of police brutality to weather phenomena to gang
rapesit then is hardly a stretch for a university administration (in this case, Rutgers University) to present
the possibility of installing cameras in classrooms as a protective measure and as the natural
course of the normalization of surveillance. Of course, the inhabitation of such pleasures is uneven
and linked to the differential effects of surveillance upon different bodies and communities . So
the questions in front of us toggle between who is being surveilled, and based on the
assumption of what political/dissident/deviant qualities? to is everyone being surveilled, and if
so, what is done with the surveillance? How are the lines drawn between pleasure and punishment? The
democratization of surveillance through networks of control demands we pay even greater attention to the uneven distribution of
disciplining, punishment, and pleasure. Gaza will be purportedly be uninhabitable by year 2020according to whose metric, and by
which predictive, prehensive algorithms? Cosmologics: How do you understand surveillance as having changed recently, and what
do you see as the challenges it will pose in the future? Jasbir Puar: One tendency I have also been tracking is the
Occupier/Israel. This to me seems to be yet another manifestation of surveillance which is indebted to Foucaults regimes of
security, but which also mutates it. It is not just an attempt to eliminate unwanted entities through a
paternalistic discourse of protectionism, but an actual predictive economy that is much more deliberate in
its targeting. Gaza will be purportedly be uninhabitable by year 2020according to whose metric,
and by which predictive, prehensive algorithms? How is this inevitability procured? The prehensive
is about putting into place a set of predictive facts-on-the-ground, in the terms of the language
of risk, which extends itself to a projected apocalypse. This set of constructed facts then
lends itself easily to the representation of Gaza as a natural disaster likely to happen. This kind
of surveillance, in the name not only of securitization but also of controlling the future, is one, I believe,
with which we will increasingly have to grapple.
c. The alternative is to embrace new technologies that emerge and become
metaphorical cyborgs
Haraway 85 (Diana Haraway, Ph.D. in Biology Researches gender and
primatology. A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in
the Late Twentieth Century, orig. published 1985, Socialist Review republished
2000. Pages 291-293, Yung Jung)
A cyborg is a cybernetic organism, a hybrid of machine and organism, a creature of social reality
as well as a creature of fiction. Social reality is lived social relations, our most important political
construction, a world-changing fiction. The international women's movements have constructed 'women's
experience', as well as uncovered or discovered this crucial collective object. This experience is a fiction and fact of the
most crucial, political kind. Liberation rests on the construction of the consciousness, the
imaginative apprehension, of oppression, and so of possibility. The cyborg is a matter of fiction
and lived experience that changes what counts as women's experience in the late twentieth century. This
is a struggle over life and death, but the boundary between science fiction and social reality is an
optical illusion. Contemporary science fiction is full of cyborgs creatures simultaneously animal and machine, who populate
worlds ambiguously natural and crafted. Modern medicine is also full of cyborgs, of couplings between organism and machine, each
conceived as coded devices, in an intimacy and with a power that was not generated in the history of sexuality. Cyborg 'sex' restores
some of the lovely replicative baroque of ferns and invertebrates (such nice organic prophylactics against heterosexism). Cyborg
replication is uncoupled from organic reproduction. Modern production seems like a dream of cyborg colonization work, a dream
that makes the nightmare of Taylorism seem idyllic. And modern war is a cyborg orgy, coded by C3I, command-controlcommunication-intelligence, an $84 billion item in 1984's US defence budget. I am making an argument for the cyborg as a fiction
mapping our social and bodily reality and as an imaginative resource suggesting some very fruitful couplings. Michael Foucault's
biopolitics is a flaccid premonition of cyborg politics, a very open field. By the late twentieth century, our time, a mythic time, we
are all chimeras, theorized and fabricated hybrids of machine and organism; in short, we are
cyborgs. The cyborg is our ontology; it gives us our politics. The cyborg is a condensed image of
both imagination and material reality, the two joined centres structuring any possibility of
historical transformation. In the traditions of 'Western' science and politics the tradition of
racist, male-dominant capitalism; the tradition of progress; the tradition of the appropriation of
nature as resource for the productions of culture; the tradition of reproduction of the self from
the reflections of the other the relation between organism and machine has been a border
war. The stakes in the border war have been the territories of production, reproduction, and
imagination. This chapter is an argument for pleasure in the confusion of boundaries and for
responsibility in their construction. It is also an effort to contribute to socialist-feminist culture
and theory in a postmodernist, non-naturalist mode and in the utopian tradition of
imagining a world without gender, which is perhaps a world without genesis, but maybe
also a world without end. The cyborg incarnation is outside salvation history. Nor does it mark time on an oedipal
calendar, attempting to heal the terrible cleavages of gender in an oral symbiotic utopia or post-oedipal apocalypse. As Zoe Sofoulis
argues in her unpublished manuscript on Jacques Lacan, Melanie Klein, and nuclear culture, Lacklein, the most terrible and perhaps
the most promising monsters in cyborg worlds are embodied in non-oedipal narratives with a different logic of repression, which we
need to understand for our survival. The cyborg is a creature in a post-gender world; it has no truck with
ultimate self untied at last from all dependency, a man in space. An origin story in the 'Western', humanist
sense depends on the myth of original unity, fullness, bliss and terror, represented by the phallic mother from whom all humans
must separate, the task of individual development and of history, the twin potent myths inscribed most powerfully for us in
psychoanalysis and Marxism. Hilary Klein has argued that both Marxism and psychoanalysis, in their concepts of labour and of
individuation and gender formation, depend on the plot of original unity out of which difference must be produced and enlisted in a
drama of escalating domination of woman/nature. The cyborg skips the step of original unity, of identification
with nature in the Western sense. This is its illegitimate promise that might lead to subversion of its teleology as star
wars. The cyborg is resolutely committed to partiality, irony, intimacy, and perversity. It is
oppositional, utopian, and completely without innocence. No longer structured by the polarity of public
and private, the cyborg defines a technological polls based partly on a revolution of social relations in the oikos, the household.
Nature and culture are reworked; the one can no longer be the resource for appropriation or incorporation by the other. The
relationships for forming wholes from parts, including those of polarity and hierarchical domination, are at issue in the cyborg
world. Unlike the hopes of Frankenstein's monster, the cyborg does not expect its father to save it through a
restoration of the garden; that is, through the fabrication of a heterosexual mate, through its
completion in a finished whole, a city and cosmos. The cyborg does not dream of community on the model of the
organic family, this time without the oedipal project. The cyborg would not recognize the Garden of Eden; it is not made of mud and
cannot dream of returning to dust. Perhaps that is why I want to see if cyborgs can subvert the apocalypse of returning to nuclear
dust in the manic compulsion to name the Enemy. Cyborgs are not reverent; they do not re-member the
cosmos. They are wary of holism, but needy for connection- they seem to have a natural feel for
united front politics, but without the vanguard party. The main trouble with cyborgs, of course, is that they are
the illegitimate offspring of militarism and patriarchal capitalism, not to mention state socialism. But illegitimate offspring are often
exceedingly unfaithful to their origins. Their fathers, after all, are inessential.
The role of the ballot is to create queer heterotopias, spaces away from regulation or
marginalization in which subjects can become unfixed and malleable
Jones 9 [Angela, Queer Heterotopias: Homonormativity and the Future of Queerness,
interalia: a journal of queer studies, 2009 4, Assistant Professor of Sociology at
Farmingdale State College,
http://www.interalia.org.pl/en/artykuly/2009_4/13_queer_heterotopias_homonormativity_a
nd_the_future_of_queerness.htm] //khirn
Gilles Deleuze and Queer Heterotopias
The future of queer theory, queer politics, and queer heterotopias relies on nomadology, or Gilles
Deleuze's notion that we are not fixed beings. Deleuze wanted to release Western thought from the chokehold of essentialism.
Gilles Deleuze's concept of assemblages helps us think critically about utilizing
technology to shape queer practices and subjectivities. "A human body is an assemblage of genetic
material, ideas, powers of acting and a relation to other bodies" (Colebrook: 2002). Life is a series of connections; there is no
beginning or end that we can somehow uncover through research. Also drawing from Michael Warner (1993) we can only imagine
the emergence of queer heterotopias; we cannot configure an exact program or prescription for the future of queerness. While
throughout this article I interrogate existing strategies for creating queer heterotopic spaces and present illustrations of possibilities,
none of this is meant to prescribe an exact vision of queerness; this article just utilizes a Deleuzian framework to explore its
possibilities. Mimesis, whether through drag or trans identities, is a promising but limited strategy for creating
queer heterotopias. It cannot be the only strategy we use to disrupt essentialist discourses and
universalizing subjectivities. This queer identity may limit the ability for subjects to become
unfixed, unstable, and malleable, which is the ultimate goal. From Deleuze we draw the question: in
what ways can we deterritorialize the body in an effort to break down the subject (Grosz: 1999, Gatens & Lloyd: 1999)? The
emergence of assemblages may enable the dismantling what Gilles Delueze called molar categories, or what
many call binaries. Can there be bodies without organs, or technologically-constructed bodies within complex systems of desire
and power relations that continually produce so much difference that the subject might disappear? Queer heterotopias
require a post-human vision that not only seeks to disrupt binaries like, man/woman,
male/female, hetero/homo, but also human/non-human (Haraway: 1991). Can there be no stable
identity? In order for queer heterotopias to flourish, there must be a move away from stable identities, not
towards them, as we are currently witnessing. In Judith Butler's most recent work she says, "it seems crucial to realize that a
livable life does require various degrees of stability" (2004: 8). The idea that having a fixed or stable identity is a
human need is socially constructed. Our compulsory need to have fixed identities was created by a need for rigid social
order. While having fixed subjectivities is a social need, there is no reason to believe that having a stable identity is a human need.
To my mind, to flourish, the human condition needs transformation. A transgendered person, a body modifier, etc., do not
necessarily desire to be something else; it is the process of transformation that feeds the human soul. Rethinking the idea of
queer heterotopias requires that theories of difference, particularly sexual difference, abandon
all fascination with metaphysics (Colebrook: 2000, Braidotti: 2005), give up the notion that political action
requires fixed identities. The demise of the compulsory need to order and create any fixed identity/subject/body is the key to
developing queer heterotopias further. However, creating queer heterotopias, or spaces where the infinite
performances of queerness can exist and flourish free from regulation and marginalization, free from violence, and free to exist and
be recognized, cannot be accomplished if we have a fixed notion of what queer bodies look
for
the "other" to be transgressive, and which are located in real spaces. Drawing from the work of
Michel Foucault, I argue that queer heterotopias are places where individuals can challenge the
heteronormative regime and are "free" to perform their gender and sexuality without fear
of being qualified, marginalized, or punished.[1] Queer heterotopias are material spaces
where radical practices go unregulated. Unlike his previous work on power, in "Of Other Spaces,"
Foucault (1986) noted that in everyday life escaping repression requires the creation of
heterotopic spaces, where individuals can celebrate their difference. Unlike utopias,
heterotopic spaces can be created in reality.
Queer heterotopias are sites of empowerment. They always exist in relation to
heteronormative spaces and are shaped by them. Queer heterotopias exist in opposition
to heteronormative spaces and are spaces where individuals seek to disrupt heterosexist
discourses. They are sites where actors, whether academics or activists, engage in what we might
call a radical politics of subversion, where individuals attempt to dislocate the normative
configurations of sex, gender, and sexuality through daily exploration and experimentation with
crafting a queer identity. Queer relates to unspecified social practices that challenge the
hegemonic discourses on sex, gender, sexuality. To perform queer through everyday practice means to
constantly behave in ways, whether through sexual practice or aesthetically transforming one's body, that defy the
conventional sex/gender system. Various rituals, from sex acts, to getting dressed in the morning, to body modifications
are ways individuals shape their queerness and in turn create queer heterotopias. The ways in which queerness
develops in everyday life must be seen less as a clearly-defined political program and
more as a spiritual journey individuals embark on. Their everyday battles shape queer
subjectivity and have political consequences. This article explores the development of
queer heterotopias, and the problematic way in which queerness is being made, re-made,
and fixed by academics and well-meaning activists who would like to appropriate,
qualify, and fix queer subjectivity in order to advance a rights-based political program.
arena where this discussion is being deployed is the social imaginary , which is a
highly contested social space where the technoteratological imaginary, supported
and promoted by post-industrial societies, is rampant. Whether we like it or not, and most of
us do not, we are made to desire the interface human/machine . I want to argue consequently
that, given the importance of both the social imaginary and the role of technology in
coding it, we need to develop both forms of representation and of resistance that
are adequate. Adequate representations are the heart of the matter. As I have often argued ,
Deleuze shares with a great deal of feminists the need for a renewal of our
imaginary repertoires. Conceptual creativity is called for, new figurations are needed
to help us to think through the maze of techno-teratological culture. Let me clarify one important point here. I
have been referring to the imaginary as a set of socially mediated practices which function as the anchoring
point albeit unstable and contingent for identifications and therefore for identity formation. These practices
act like interactive structures where desire as a subjective yearning and agency in a broader socio-political sense
are mutually shaped by one another. Neither pure imagination locked in its classical opposition to reason
nor fantasy in the Freudian sense, the imaginary for me marks a space of transitions and transactions.
Nomadic, in a Deleuzean sense, it flows like symbolic glue between the social and the self,
the outside constitutive outside, as Stuart Hall would say, quoting Derrida and the subject: the
material and the ethereal. It flows, but it is sticky: it catches on as it goes. It possesses
fluidity, but it distinctly lacks transparency, let alone purity. I have used the term
desire in keeping with my poststructuralist training to connote the subjects own
investment, or enmeshment, in this sticky network of inter-related social and
discursive effects. This network constitutes the social field as a libidinal or
affective landscape, as well as a normative or disciplinary framework. possesses any unitary or
generalised meaning, nor can any philosopher easily promise an immediate Nietzschean
transmutation of values. It is rather the case that the task of decoding and accounting for
the imaginary has been a critical concern for social and cultural critics since the 1960s.
It has provided the arena in which different and often conflicting critiques of
representation have clashed, fuelling the discourse of the crisis of representation . I
think this crisis needs to be read in the context of the decline of Europe as a world power (West 1994 ). It is also
intrinsic to the post-nuclear predicament of an advanced world whose social
realities become virtual or dematerialised because they are changing at such a fast
rate under the pressure and the acceleration of a digitally-clad economy .
of fiction and lived experience that changes what counts as women's experience in
the late twentieth century. This is a struggle over life and death, but the boundary
between science fiction and social reality is an optical illusion (Haraway: 1991:149).
We are already becoming cyborgs. Science fiction and modernity have collided. The emergence
of the cyborg body is breaking down traditional binary constructions like
male/female. Even further, it breaks down important binaries like human/non-human. The cyborg or
techno-body opens up the possibilities for asking new questions about subjectivity
and destroys essential categories of organization. Perhaps Renee Richard's presence on the
tennis court and Oscar Pistorious'[3] sprinting signal the coming of queer heterotopias. They both certainly force
a new dialogue within society about the usefulness of traditional binaries. Moreover, as these others emerge and
multiply, they force discourse to expand to meet their needs. For example, recently the International Olympic
Committee allowed transsexuals to compete in the Olympics. On a micro-level individuals can force society to
slowly change merely by behaving "queerly." The hybridization of bodies and technologies forces people to
rethink how they understand and perceive human life.
Hybridization produces the multiplication and amplification of difference and identities. The increase in
hybridization is linked with the rise of global capitalism and advanced technology (Braidotti: 2002, 2006). The
possibilities of the techno-body are tempting. However, it could all too readily become yet another grand
narrative where technology will be the weapon of revolution. Moreover, the romanticism of the techno-body is
only helping to create yet another fixed identity (to be exploited and marginalized). However, new
Beasley 10 [Chris, The Elephant in the Room: Heterosexuality in Critical Gender/Sexuality Studies, NORA Nordic Journal of Feminist and Gender Research, Volume 18, Issue 3, 2010] //khirn
Rather than conceiving heterosexuality as simply to be conflated with the heteronormative, as a closed system, it
is useful to consider the Deleuzian account of becomingthe notion of an open-ended system (Deleuze &
Guattari 1980/1987: 612; see also Chia 1996: 3435). Such a conception does not necessarily
hetero/homo and gender binaries (though this might indeed be a direction) and
thus does not propose heterosexuality's productivity as a synonym for erasure of
its specificity. Rather such an approach enables heterosexuality to be reconceived
as a field of potential transgression. The intention of such a rethinking is bring to
the fore a positive optimistic micro-politics and destabilize socio-political
determinism. Nevertheless, to my mind this is not sufficient to a consideration of transgression in relation to
the mainstream, to heterosexuality. Deleuze, along with Foucault and queer theorists like Bersani, turns our
attention to a positive fluidity, mobility, and multiplicity. However, this unremitting attention to a propulsive
social creativity, to flows of becoming which have infinite possibilities (Jenkins 2009: xi, emphasis added) may
involve a privileged disembodiment side-stepping racialized/ethnic/cultural location in bodily and geographic
terms (Beasley 2005: 168174). The Deleuzian emphasis on the open-ended quality of sociality, on becoming
rather than being, offers a significant step forward for analyses of heterosexuality and heterosex, in so far as
they have become encased in negative characterization as exemplary normalization. Nevertheless, such an openended emphasis can amount to a strategy not simply of de-essentializing but of dematerialization, which places in
the shadows asymmetric constraints in existing social relations but also the constraints of visceral physicality and
embodied interconnection. Sexuality and heterosex demand an account of pleasure and transgression which
tenaciously holds on to the sensuous fleshliness of sociality, to both the creativity and the limits of social flesh
(Beasley & Bacchi 2007). Secondly, fluidity/multiplicity in sexual practices is not necessarily transgressive.
Endless fluidity/multiplicity perhaps can be deemed transgressive in relation to minority sexualities, but in the
sphere of the heterosexual mainstream such productivity might after all largely maintain and extend the
hegemony of the heteronormative. For heterosexual transgression to have any substantive
The Cyborg breaks down racial, sexual, and gender binaries --- its capable of
destructuring identitarian dogma
Miyake 4 (Esperanza Miyake, PhD in Gender and Womans studies, My, is that Cyborg a little bit Queer?,
Journal of International Women's Studies Volume: 5 No. 2, published March 2004, pages 57-58, Yung Jung)
the frontiers of what is possible and to unsettle reality (1990, 148). The queer cyborg, with a
hand on its (in)organic crotch, rejoices its perverse status/strategy and confronts authority whilst challenging
the Western quest for innocence and origin. The breakdown of animal/machine boundary
allows queer cyborgs to a rejoice in the illegitimate fusion (Haraway 1985, p.176)
of machine and body. Not only does this signify the symbolic fact that there is a growing awareness
amongst women to see their bodies as powerful machines, better than (hu)mans; but also, the body as the
battleground, tool and escape from the masculinist orgy. Wittigs war machine seems to also have a place within
this hybrid. The body becomes not just the writing, written and (re)written, it
becomes the war machine that utilizes strategies of parody and inversion for
purposes of political analysis and protest (Palmer 1993, p.99). On a physical level, the body and
the machine are literally becoming more and more integrated. Wilson observes that, you could never be certain
where the edges are. Multiplicity is another way of not being sure where peoples edges are, where their identity
begins and ends (Wilson 1995, p.243). Queer cyborgs would enjoy hearing that . The amalgamation of
body and machine makes the queer cyborg monstrous, strong, sexy and powerful .
In Do Androids dream of Electric Sheep? the human characters in the novel carry empathy boxes which are
mechanic extensions of the body that enable the carrier to feel empathy. In addition, they carry Penfield mood
organs which allow them to choose and set a mood they want to be in. Hawthorne expresses a concern over this
matter, and wonders whether there will be a point where we will no longer listen to our bodiesperhaps we will
no longer feel sympathy? (Hawthorne 1999, p.233). Whilst this might be a cause for apprehension, concern, and
even fear, the soullessness of a machine that Wilson describes, coupled with the bestiality of humans indeed,
evokes horror (1995, p.246), the perfect confrontational tool for the queer cyborg engaging in the politics of
provocation. In addition, Wilson argues that machines are composed out of parts. They may be assembled and
disassembled. They are open to modifications or retoolings (1985, p.247). Does this not sound like the physical
realisation of what Haraway originally stated? A disassembled and reassembled, postmodern, collective and
personal self (1985, p.163). She is right: the machine is us, our processes and an aspect of our embodiment (1985,
p.180). The final binary breakdown occurs between the physical/non-physical. Haraway claims that cyborgs are
creatures that are no longer structured by the polarity of public and private (1985, p.151). As I have mentioned
before, the queer cyborg is an entity that drifts in/out/on/off-line. As the screen which resides in the private home
becomes a window to the public network of power, the distinction between private/public become more and more
blurred. Haraway expands upon this point by mentioning the eradication of the public and private life through
growing technology, such as video games (1985, p.168). Foster makes an excellent point in saying that the virtual
reality computer interfaces or telepresence technologies both restage and disrupt the distinction between inner
and outer worlds (2000, p.440). This means that we are in a position to embody the outside power, and also
empower the outside body. Queer cyborgs can thus detach their public persona with their
physical body, strengthening the argument that gender, and other categories are
just a stage act, unlinked to the physical self. The parade continues on/off-line, noisy and
garrulous; Bateson argues that there must be a systematic relation between the internal and the external---the
engineer's term for nonsystematic elements in codification is noise(1970, p.30). And this relation between the
external and internal occurs because there is no barrier, no solid boundary that separates the two. Let the music
be heard, loud and clear for there will be no inner closet with its door----queer cyborgs no longer need to come
out for they are already there.
performance of this metaphor within the context of art creates a conceptual space
within which we can imagine and perform an embodied pedagogy of resistance.
Discussing the cultural work of performance artists such as Stelarc, Eduardo Kac, Orlan, and Guillermo G6mezPefia and Roberto Sifuentes we examine the pedagogical characteristics of their performances and the ways that
they challenge the effects of information technologies on their bodies and identities, a critique that we refer to as
"cyborg pedagogy." A euphemism for "cybernetic organism," Haraway (1991) defines the cyborg as "a hybrid of
machine and organism, a creature of social reality as well as a creature of fiction" (p. 149). Thus , "cyborg
Deleuzes enfleshed, vitalistic but not essentialist vision of the subject is a selfsustainable one, which in some ways owes a lot to the ecology of the self. The
rhythm, speed and sequencing of the affects and the selection of the constitutive
elements are crucial to the whole process . It is the pattern of re-occurrence of
these changes that marks the successive steps in the process of becoming , thus
allowing for the actualisation of a field of forces that is apt to frame and thus to
express the singularity of the subject. This is a way of containing the excessive
edges of the postmodernist discourse about the body, notably the denial of the
materiality of the bodily self. Deleuze proposes instead a form of neo-materialism
and a blend of vitalism that is attuned to the technological era. Thinking through the body,
and not in a flight away from it, means confronting boundaries and limitations. These claims also constitute the
basis of Deleuzes critique of Lacanian psychoanalysis. Special emphasis is placed on the criticism of the
sacralisation of the sexual self by Lacan as well as the teleological structure of identity formation in
psychoanalytic theory, which shows its Hegelian legacy. Not the least of this concerns the definition of desire as
lack, to which Deleuze never ceases to oppose the positivity of desire. More on this later. On an everyday
sociological level, as Camilla Griggers (1997) points out, the body is striking back, with a vengeance. An estimated
two million American women have silicon breast implants most of which leak, bounce off during bumpy airplane
flights or cause undesirable side-effects. Millions of women throughout the advanced world are on Prozac or
other mood-enhancement drugs. The hidden epidemic of anorexiabulimia continues to strike one third of the
younger women of the opulent world, as Princess Diana so clearly illustrated. Killer diseases today do not include
only the great exterminators, like cancer and AIDS, but also the return of traditional diseases which we thought
we had conquered, like tuberculosis and malaria. The human immunity system has adapted to
the anti-bodies and we are vulnerable again. In such a historical, bio-political and
geo-political context, there is no question that what, even and especially in