FROM DINOSAUR TO DRAGONFLY: TRANSCENDING THE HUMAN/MACHINE BINARY
Exploring the question “Why technology matters to writing,” Porter argues for a “cyborgian, posthumanist view of writing technologies” (387). Rather than continue to regard the human user and the machine (computer technology) as a binary, as two separate, isolated entities independent of each other, Porter argues the opposite. His article challenges us as human users to acknowledge the relationship, the interconnectedness between the human user and the technology or machine (388).
When a writer uses technology to write and produce text and more, she transcends the boundaries between them becoming one with the machine. This is, says Porter, a cyborg or “cyberwriter.” Quoting Donna Haraway he says, “A posthumanist approach explores cyborgian hybridity, the connectedness between human—machine. Such an approach begins by recognizing that ‘there are no essential differences or absolute demarcations between bodily existence and computer simulation, cybernetic mechanism and biological organism, robot technology and human goals’” (387). We human users of our machines need to move beyond our entrenched, defensive stand that man is better than a machine to understand, as Porter says, “machines can help us be better as humans” (387).
There is, however, a point here that causes me to pause and wonder if I have missed a connection in Porter’s argument. As human beings we are animated with the breath of life, organic, living matter. Machines, no matter their sophisticated technology and capability, are not. Nevertheless, I am so intrigued and challenged by this article that I find myself suddenly eager to shed my stone age approach to technology and embrace the 21st century. Why not love and cherish books, adore the heft and smell of them, collect my wooden pencils and paper pads and also like my daughters and younger friends, flit like a lovely dragonfly over all the bounty that technology offers.
When a writer uses technology to write and produce text and more, she transcends the boundaries between them becoming one with the machine. This is, says Porter, a cyborg or “cyberwriter.” Quoting Donna Haraway he says, “A posthumanist approach explores cyborgian hybridity, the connectedness between human—machine. Such an approach begins by recognizing that ‘there are no essential differences or absolute demarcations between bodily existence and computer simulation, cybernetic mechanism and biological organism, robot technology and human goals’” (387). We human users of our machines need to move beyond our entrenched, defensive stand that man is better than a machine to understand, as Porter says, “machines can help us be better as humans” (387).
There is, however, a point here that causes me to pause and wonder if I have missed a connection in Porter’s argument. As human beings we are animated with the breath of life, organic, living matter. Machines, no matter their sophisticated technology and capability, are not. Nevertheless, I am so intrigued and challenged by this article that I find myself suddenly eager to shed my stone age approach to technology and embrace the 21st century. Why not love and cherish books, adore the heft and smell of them, collect my wooden pencils and paper pads and also like my daughters and younger friends, flit like a lovely dragonfly over all the bounty that technology offers.
Porter labeling the cyborgian as posthumanist is not only reinforcing a new print/digital binary that privileges computers over books, but erases at least seventy years of literary theory that had challenged humanism at least since the New Criticism, Structuralism and Post, Marxism and Feminist Literary--to Post Colonialism, Queer and Environmental theory and of course Postmodernism. Introduction to Modern Literary Theory lists how far theory has traveled from it humanist roots.
ReplyDeleteThe site of the body Porter cites as feminist theory to decenter the humanist binary of human and machine misses the point of cyborg (see Nell, the protagonists in Neal Stephenson's "The Diamond Age: Or a Young Lady's Illustrated Reader," is a true feminist cyborg) is a premature misnomer for the form and function of computers that are in no aspect human body friendly. Meanwhile this body aches and cramps conforming to the machine. I must try to get up--my all too human motherboard is short-circuiting