Breaking Boundaries

1. Donna Haraway’s Cyborg Manifesto:

Tuesday’s discussion of Donna Haraway’s seminal essay, “A Manifesto for Cyborgs: Science, Technology, and Socialist Feminism in the 1980s”, touched on the fact that it has been co-opted and utilized for a variety of purposes. In seeking out examples of this, I came across Allucquére Rosanne Stone (AKA Sandy Stone).

Inspired by Haraway’s work, Stone was able to produce a seminal article of her own in “The Empire Strikes Back: A Posttranssexual Manifesto.”. Haraway’s scholarship informed her own approach toward transsexuality (you can access the article here).

Not unlike Haraway, Stone is evidently drawn toward muddling those boundaries, binaries, and preconceptions that otherwise tend to stifle a more liberated understanding of gender and sexuality. Stone expresses particular discontent over the fact that the “highest purpose of the transsexual is to erase h/erself, to fade into the ‘normal’ population as soon as possible” which would thereby preclude one from being able to “authentically represent the complexities and ambiguities of lived experience” and would also sacrifice “that aspect of ‘nature’ which Donna Haraway theorizes as Coyote — the Native American spirit animal who represents the power of continual transformation which is the heart of engaged life”. As Stone insists, a transsexual can only “generate a true, effective and representational counterdiscourse [...] from outside the boundaries of gender, beyond the constructed oppositional nodes which have been predefined as the only positions from which discourse is possible”. In other words, you have to get outside of the deceptively static strictures that surround you in order to stake your claim as an idiosyncratic, self-possessed individual that is not bound to exterior definitions, binaries or prescribed roles.

As Haraway explains in her manifesto, “certain dualisms have been persistent in Western traditions; they have all been systemic to the logics and practices of domination of women, people of color, nature, workers, animals – in short, domination of all constituted as others” (35). Therefore, stepping outside of the dualisms concomitant with domination (and the stagnation of prescribed gender roles) is a liberating experience that can be best understood through the permeable and fluid image of the cyborg. I think that Haraway is drawn to the cyborg as a metaphorical device because it offers a lot more room for play, nuance and the constitution of an identity that is neither static nor defined by any socially-ingrained, domineering forces. While I may have found Haraway’s polemic a little less than cogent at times (the explication of her article by other sources certainly helped), I believe she wants to circumvent those domineering forces so as to to facilitate various reconstitutions of the self. With this in mind, it is clear how Haraway’s work would function as an inspirational boon to someone like Stone, who similarly seeks to spurn the “production of universal, totalizing theory [...] that misses most of reality” and tries to “explain our bodies and tools to ourselves” (Haraway, 37). Thus, Stone encourages the acceptance of transsexual difference, rather than a conformity to existing binaries and norms. Haraway and Stone can both be understood as having iconoclastically embraced the notion of identities that do not neatly fit within widely perpetuated myths and binaries (i.e., male/female, which clearly does not accommodate any slippage or nuance of any kind).

2. Transparent Technology:

Andy Clark’s Natural-Born Cyborgs: Minds, Technologies, and the Future of Human Intelligence (referenced during Tuesday’s lecture) explores another type of boundary breaking. Therein, Clark investigates “Information appliances”, a concept coined by Donald Norman. The three characteristics of the concept are outlined as follows:

1. An information appliance is geared to support a specific activity, and to do so via the storage, reception, processing, and transmission of information.

2. Information appliances form an intercommunicating web. They can ‘talk’ to each other.

3. Information appliances are transparent technologies, designed to be easy to use, and to fade into the background. They are poised to be taken for granted.
(44).

The last characteristic definitely recalls Lia Hotckiss’ article from last week. Discussing the role of the salamander in Cronenberg’s eXistenZ, Hotchkiss noted that it represented a “melding of the technical and natural” (25) and a “thoughtful use of special effects to create a diegetic world that portrays the collapse of the nature/culture split” (26). In last week’s blog post, I used this idea as a springboard to further consider augmented reality (AR) and how it might one day become indistinguishable from what we consider our innately physical reality. As Hotchkiss explains: “human manipulation becomes itself a part of the plurality and complexity of nature rather than interference with an otherwise freestanding entity” (25). Although I didn’t mention this last week, Hotchkiss also cites Haraway’s “A Manifesto For Cyborgs”, noting that “eXistenZ‘s critical position with respect to virtual reality and manipulation of the material [...] is in keeping not only with Haraway’s suspicion of transcendence but also with her celebration of the permeable boundary between humans and machines, namely, our cyborg status” (26).

Thus, Clark more or less joins Hotchkiss, Haraway and Stone in a consideration of muddled boundaries. While Haraway used the cyborg metaphorically in order to unsettle binaries and socially ingrained preconceptions in her manifesto, Clark attends to the the more literal role of technology as an exceedingly discreet force that may insidiously change the nature/technology and body/technology divides in particular.

More specifically, he appropriate Norman’s concept in order to coin his own: “dynamic appliances” (57). As Clark explains,

“The combination of dynamic appliances and transparent technologies are surely a match made in cyborg heaven [...] The biological brain is constantly striving to streamline, chunk, compile, and automate, and it does so by attending to repeated patterns of activity and use. Dynamic information appliances would, when appropriate, do just the same. The combination of brains that learn about technologies, with ubiquitous, increasingly transparent technologies that ‘learn’ about individual brains, sets the scene for a cognitive symbiosis whose full potential and implications none of us can yet fully appreciate” (57-58).

In other words, Clark is following the pursuit of intuitive and unobtrusive technology to its farthest, logical conclusions. Not only is he picturing a world where the ubiquity of technology accompanies its utterly seamless integration into our daily lives, but where it also functions in a way not entirely dissimilar from our own brains. The idea of cognitive symbiosis is certainly a fascinating concept that may nonetheless seem a little too farfetched as of right now. However, considering Kevin Warwick‘s audacious work and goals, I thought it would be worth looking into some of the similar (albeit less mind-blowingly sophisticated than what Clark seems to be picturing) examples of covert interactions between machine and human-beings.

Consider Swiss company IMI’s “Intelligent Retinal Implant System”:

This article from Gizmodo (conveniently enough, the site is doing a “This Cyborg Life” week) explains the process as follows:

A Swiss company called IMI has been putting its “Intelligent Retinal Implant System” [IRIS] through clinical trials for the past three years. When it’s ready, it could help restore sight to the blind. The use of a high-speed digital signal processor allows the provision of “intelligent information” to the implant (and the nerve cells) by using tuneable software to approximate the information processing normally carried out by the healthy retina. The entire process enables patients to optimize their visual perception during the learning phase. Indeed, using the patient’s feedback on perception as an input for the tuning of The Pocket Processor is the unique, patent-protected feature of the System and constitutes the ‘learning’ capability of the Learning Retinal Implant System.

While this isn’t quite as advanced as the cognitive symbiosis between machine and human (and it’s still in the vaporware stage), it does substantiate the fact that new and interesting ways of augmenting our biological functions is a consistent point of research. Moreover, tuneable software emulating healthy retinas that can more or less learn from us could be considered an important first step toward realizing Clark’s projections. IRIS would also qualify as an transparent act of technological interaction. Thus, this concept, if brought to fruition, might be best understood as a more or less organic mediation between technology and the human body.

Another example of the body’s accommodative nature would be Tiger Woods. As this Gizmodo article notes, he’s had “two LASIK surgeries to achieve 20/15 vision, when what we consider the best of natural vision to be is a mere 20/20. Before his first LASKI surgery, Woods had lost 16 straight tournaments. Immediately following the surgery, he won 7 of his next 10. Advantage through technology, or not?”

Here’s what he had to say about how much this technology bolstered his game:

For years I played golf with an invisible handicap, invisible to everyone but me. It was my contact lenses. My eyes would sting burn and water all the while I was trying to concentrate on championship golf. I had the Lasik procedure with a TLC laser eye center surgeon and the results were fabulous. I’m 20/20 with no contacts. My vision is so crisp I feel I can read all the subtleties of the green and look down the fairway hundreds of yards and focus perfectly on the fly. I’m very happy with the results, and grateful for my TLC center experience.

As Kevin Warwick declared, “the step to Cyborgs offers humans a natural, technological upgrade in the technological world we have instigated. Yes I feel it will be the next evolutionary step. Indeed we will need to do it if we are to compete with intelligent machines“. If the gap between computers and human-beings is closing, we can look back and note that it all started when the idea of upgrading your body (rather than your hard-drive) no longer elicited dismissive laughter. While Warwick’s experiments are more audacious (and somewhat unsettling) than those Woods undertook, the latter example is nonetheless striking proof of how the interaction between our bodies and technology is becoming fairly inconspicuous. As Tiger indicated, perhaps contacts and glasses are on their way to being scorned as ridiculously obtrusive prosthetics.

Clark further explores this idea of latent, intuitive technology in relation to augmented reality. He ends up discussing AR in pretty much the same vein that Hotchkiss considered eXistenZ‘s salamander, thereby complimenting my own concerns/points from last week. That is, not as a patently artificial eyesore but a seamless continuation of our physical (and/or biological) worlds:

“the key innovation is to allow the physical and the informational realms to seamlessly merge and mingle, in ways that unobtrusively support daily activity and that make maximum use of our normal means of embodied, socially embedded activity” (53)

Allow me to supplement this quote with one from Norman himself, taken from Eric Bergman’s Information Appliances and Beyond: Interaction Design for Consumer Products:

“So, I see a change occurring from the one massive, centrally located infrastructure, the personal computer, to a set of rather small, widely distributed devices that we won’t even think of as computers, we won’t think of as telecommunication devices even though that’s what they will be. We’ll just think of them as a natural part of our daily activities and the tools that we us” (12).

As Clark further explains, Norman is looking ahead to a world where technology is “maximally nonopaque [...] What matters is that as far as our conscious awareness is concerned, the tool itself fades into the background, becoming transparent in skilled use” (45). As Joe explained, this can be a psychological effect — our use of a device becomes so habitual that we no longer attend to its novelty. Moreover, this effect can also be supplemented by the actual design of the device. A cumbersome, massive computer bound to your desk certainly isn’t going to blend into the background. However, this is a problem of the past. ‘Think Small’ has become more than a pithy milestone in advertising but an entire philosophy that defines companies like Apple. Thus, while Tiger Woods offers an example of technological manipulation at its most covert, I’m also intrigued by the less advanced iterations of human/technology convergence. Namely, the physical devices that we use (or may eventually use) on a daily basis that are adopting more inconspicuous designs…

Admittedly, the Chamelephone (at the left) is still moored in the realm of vaporware, but it’s nonetheless a relevant example of the trend toward more subtle technological devices. It’s listed on Wired.com among other forthcoming, high-tech cellphone designs. The concept behind it involves having the phone take on the texture of whatever surface you happen to place it on top of. Joining Tiger Woods and IRIS, it’s examples like these that render the possibility of increasingly transparent and intuitive technologies a little less preposterous.

Then again, I should be wary of becoming overly certain in my own projections. The boundaries have yet to be entirely broken. There was a discussion during Tuesday’s class about how the difference between those who talk out-loud into their bluetooth headsets and those who tend to talk out-loud to themselves was somewhat negligible (at first glance). This speaks to the idea that conversations via these headsets are still a somewhat off-putting and unnatural thing to observe despite the device’s (arguably dubious) claim to discreet intuitiveness. As a final note, I can’t help but defer to Larry David on this one:

Not exactly the inconspicuous, seamless integration envisioned by Clark and Norman. Evidently, technology and humans haven’t quite converged to the point where we’re entirely free from such obtrusively obnoxious/bemusing side-effects. Even Warwick’s experiments are pretty off-putting despite their concealed nature (mostly because they further confirm the violability of the human body). I think it might be a while yet before we become fully comfortable with these more preliminary and cumbersome (or just downright discomfiting) convergences with technology.