Human-Machine Relationship

It has been generally noted, by McLuhan and others, that technology is an extension, an exteriorization of faculties of the human body, brain and nervous system. In the current era, as we are completing this process of emulating the nervous system and brain into our networks and computers, we see a start of a new process, which is the integration of the externalized technologies back into our bodies. This is generally discussed under the theme of the cyborg. Today, matter, life and mind are in the process of being understood on the basis of a reduction to their informational basis, giving rise to nanotechnology, biotechnology and artificial intelligence. On the basis of a continued dominnce of a mechanistic and manipulative framework, the results could be seen as an extension, to an unprecedented scale, our our alienation. Negri notes in a similar fashion, that the productive machines have entered us, in particular now that the brain itself, i.e. creative innovation, is seen as the most important productive factor, and now that we have access to increasingly cheap computers and a worldwide internet network that is outside of full corporate dominance. Yet this creative work is still generally under the command of financial capital. Negri attempts to go beyond the human-machine dichotomy, and to see the emancipatory potential in this state of affairs:

Toni Negri on the human-machine relationship

“The Multitude not only uses machines to produce, but also becomes increasingly machinic itself, as the means of production are increasingly integrated into their minds and bodies. The productive machines have been integrated into the multitude, but it has no control over them, making more vicious their alienation. This suggests that the actual subversion of the productive system into an autonomous plane could be possible in a flash, by disconnecting it from capital command�? (personal communication, from http://www.ephemeraweb.org/journal/4-3/4-3editorial.pdf)

Dale Carrico on why we were cyborgs already long ago

This short blog entry by Dale Carrico makes an important counterpoint to any hype associated with "post-humanism":

"No question, medical and media devices are beginning to enter into some stunningly and disturbingly intimate relations with their makers these days. And in this intercourse of subjects and objects some deeply held expectations, norms, customs are twittering in ways that are edifying and upsetting by turns.

But are we right to think that the prostheticization of humanity is really so unprecedented as all that? Just who are the cyborgs? Who are these troubling chimeras, cyberneticized post-people, roboticized newcomers exactly?

Is it only Kevin Warwick or Steve Mann with their glamorous implants who count and conjure up the specter of scary cyborgological futures, or is it every boring paunchy uncle at the cookout with his cellphone and pacemaker who claws at Pandora's box-lid? Why don't vaccinations or shoe stores or sign language render Average Joe just as post-biological as Locutus of Borg?

When Aristotle defined "man" as a "political animal," that was the first cyborg manifesto as far as I can tell. It was a claim that human beings become different in their "essential natures" when they live together in cities. Already our embodied selves did not decisively end in our skins, but spread out into and were definitively impinged upon by culture and artifice.

Prostheticization does not make humans into posthumans, but defines the inaugural moment when humanity stepped onto the scene of history." (http://amormundi.blogspot.com/2006/02/honestly-who-isnt-cyborg.html)

A related argument is made here at http://amormundi.blogspot.com/2005/04/tvii-subject-object-abject.html