Re: Re: Cyborg variations

[Rob Schaap <carob@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

>The cyborg has nothing to add to the sandwichman, who was always already
>objectified, animated, redundant and in disguise.
>
>((((((((((
>
>CB: This could be a Beatles' song.
>
And we the eggmen, calibrated prettily all in a row, ere we be beaten into
yellow matter custard that we might drip at a properly regulated flow from
the dead dog's eye?

Talk of cyborgs inevitably attends an assumption that we live in an age so
exceptional that a 'new' way of thinking about it is called for
('information exceptionalism' some call this technodeterministic fetishism).
 The cyborg cannot know of history, nor that it is still in it, for it would
then not be a cyborg at all.  It would be a proletarian - calibrated,
regulated, replaced, and declared dead by The Machine not because of the
internal rhythm of That Machine, but because of the rhythms that spawned,
diffused, tasked and deified It.   We have ALWAYS been networked.  *And so
have our Machines* (so much for the Professor of the History of
Consciousness).  And we are cyborgs only insofar as we have not undertaken
to criticise our subjectivity self-consciously from within.  And it must be
from within, for, as poor old Lewis Mumford told us a long time ago, We Are
The Machine.

Haraway is indeed a cyborg.  The assembled Penpals are not, however, and
eagerly await the Sandwichman's Manifesto - the full expression of which I
dare hope is in the offing ... ?

These beans are good,
Rob.