Cyborg and Gothic

Introduction to English 122tg: Cyborg Genealogies: the Gothic

Three key concepts for opening our inquiry into the exchange between the cyborg and the gothic

the cyborg: what is a cyborg? definitions: (George Landow's Cyborg site)
the gothic: what is the gothic? gothic literature defined (Franz Potter Gothic Literature site)
the hybrid: what is a hybrid? : that which mixes nature and culture, the human and the nonhuman:

Narrativing the Arrival of Hybrids
NATURE
earth and billions of living things
all that is, before humans organize
		CULTURE
the baby at the moment of birth	the civil adult: the first hybrid?	the rules of raising a child
mouth, tongue, lungs, brain, air		the coming of language and knowledge
		ENTER SCIENCE
		delves into the "secrets" of nature:
nature's materials and resources manipulated on behalf of culture--...	....so nature is turned to the use of culture	=the rise of TECHNOLOGY*
	Examples of Hybrids
infertile woman		invetro fertilization
	baby conceived in a test-tube
earth's atmosphere		exhaust from combustion
	hole in the earth's ozone layer
other examples?
???		???
	the cyborg
The Romantic moral opposition used to explain the confrontation nature/ culture + technology:
the animate, feeling, the subject	versus	the machine, the thing, the object

*(from Gk. techne, skill + logia, developed in a systematic fashion)

Philip K. Dick oin the inevitability of hybrids,

"The greatest change growing across our world these days is probably the momentum of the living toward reification (=thing-ification), and at the same time a reciprocal entry into animation by the mechanical. We hold now no pure categories of the living versus the nonliving; this is going to be our paradigm.... I am talking about our real world and not the world of fiction when I say: One day we will have millions of hybrid entities that have a foot in both worlds at once. To define them as "man" versus "machine" will give us verbal puzzle games to play with. ..."Man" or "human being" are terms that we must understand correctly and apply, but they apply not to origin or to any ontology (=being in itself) but to a way of being in the world; if a mechanical construct halts in its customary operation to lend you assistance, then you will posit to it, gratefully, a humanity that no analysis of its transistors and relay systems can elucidate. A scientist, tracing the wiring circuits of that machine to locate its humanness, would be like our own earnest scientists who tried in vain to locate the soul in man, and, not being able to find a specific organ located at a specific spot, opted to decline to admit that we have souls."
--"Man, Android, and Machine" (1976)

What is Dick's attitude toward the emergence of hybrids of the living and the thing, of man and machine?

Class discussion: The sheer variety of modern cyborgs suggests the strategic usefulness of not narrowing our definition of cyborgs too quickly. Our class discussion posed the issue of what sorts of forms and practices would give the human the character of a cyborg: heart pace-makers, contact lenses, certain kinds of make-up? What about the hooking of musicians into complex networks for amplifying sound?
Hybrids proliferate and the political stakes of the cyborg remain open. However, this course will attempt to do a history of the cyborg.

"A Guide to the History of Cyborgs" Professor Martin Irvine of Georgetown University has this wonderful page suggesting the issue or problem behind this Dick paragraph, and our discussion of it: in fiction, and through the 20th century appartus of cinema, there has been an enormously varied, but subtly interconnecting, visual realization of the humanoid cyborg: as Frankenstein, as robots, as sex machine, as glamour and fetish icon, and through cyborg self-fashioning (tatoos and piercing.) Take a look at this page!

The question of origin: where in Western culture did we begin to interrogate, in a self conscious fashion, our human relation to hybrids? One place to begin: in the Romantic period's gothic fiction about a human scientist creating a hybrid "creature" or "monster" Mary Shelley's Frankenstein.

Proposition: some texts carry the future within themselves; the future goes (back) towards them. Instead of fading in importance as time passes, they become more important, more in need of study. I think this is true of a number of texts in this course, but it is especially true of Shelley's Frankenstein.

Reading assignment for Class #3: To prepare for our reading of Frankenstein, we are reading a short story by the Romantic period German writer, ETA Hoffmann, "The Sandman." It is a gothic story of out of which Freud develops his theory of the psychic effect that underpins the gothic, the sense of the "uncanny."

Written assignment for Class #3: Monday, April 10th: Come with one sentence describing a topic you might be interested in writing upon.