Cyborg Subjects

= a digital cultural theory online journal and a book

URL = http://www.cyborgsubjects.org

The Book

Context

Excerpted from the preface, by Bonni Rambatan and Jacob Johanssen:

"In 2010, we set out to create a platform for two things we love and value: freedom of critical thought and digital culture. We wanted to create something that would testify of something major of our contemporary age. Having grown up with the Internet, we, the unknown digital kids, hoped to create a website that would be different from traditional academia: Cyborg Subjects was born. The major idea behind it was not only to freely publish articles that dealt with a broad range of themes and debates of the zeitgeist but to create a transparent and lively debate. We wanted to have an open review system where everything would be published and everyone could add their 2 virtual cents to an essay or artwork. This was an attack on the monopoly publishers in academia.

This anthology is a compilation of essays published in the online journal “Cyborg Subjects: Discourses on Digital Culture” circa 2010-2012. The journal started out as an experiment: curated works—artistic or essay—submitted to us via e-mail were posted online, free for anyone to review (with comments) and/or adapt (by creating new posts linking back to the original article).

A common thread that links all papers and ideas in this volume is that of the digital. The digital and with it the idea that something intangible and virtual has actual and radical impacts on our contemporary world. We wanted to explore this further and decided to focus on three major developments: digital subjectivity, or what we call the posthuman; how this subjectivity creates new political discourses, as exemplified in the Wikileaks polemic; and finally, how those discourses enable digital subjects to have strong, direct, real-world impacts, as exemplified in the 2011 revolutions.

Due to lack of interest, however, our open review system was quick to lose its mass. Although initial traction seemed to be good—many, like ourselves, hailed the Cyborg Subjects platform as a novel discourse-generating system in which “theoretical production will be able to keep up with the pace of technology”*—interaction was little, and kept decreasing (along with the number of quality submissions) through each subsequent call for papers.

This anthology gathers the top three articles submitted to our platform from each of our three calls of papers, additional articles from editors and guest writers, and one experimental article submission as a closing note. In addition, the cover of this book, submitted by Chinese artist Jung-Hua Liu, also serves a textual purpose, the statement of which can be read in this book’s appendix."

Contents

Bonni Rambatan and Jacob Johanssen:

"The organization of this book—which follows the organization of topics of our calls for papers—is as follows:

Part One, Subjects, is an exploration on the question “What is the Cyborg Subject?” Submitted by intellectuals from various fields—from music to film to psychoanalysis—this section represents the first moment: the conception of digital subjectivity. Robert Barry’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Violins? speaks of transcending humanist aesthetics, specifically in the field of music. Finding the Local by Siri Driessen and Roos van Haaften questions spatial notions in our digitized world. Bonni Rambatan’s essay Are Trees the New Proletariat? explores posthumanity not through digitized networks, but instead through what I believe to be its obverse, i.e. ecology. The final two essays, “Know Thyself” ... Again by Dustin Cohen and We Shall Overcome! by Jacob Johanssen, observe posthumanity under critical psychoanalytic lenses, questioning what exactly is lost when we claim to transcend humanity, and can be read as a warning to proceed with caution as we venture further into the realm of digital subjectivity.

Part Two, Sharing, takes on this venture and proceeds to the second moment: when digital subjectivity turns into global resistance, specifically in the Wikileaks polemic. Indeed, our second call for papers was made to garner response from intellectuals in those fields. Wikileaks: Signs and Seeds of Future Utopias by Aliki Tzatha discusses how Wikileaks sheds light to contemporary political culture and the taste for transhumanism it reflects. A ‘Turning of the Tables’ by Zakary Paget examines Wikileaks as an exemplary tool of counter-surveillance against authority. In A New Style of News Reporting by Stefan Baack, we explore the idea of data-driven journalism, or really the new trend of news discourse production. (One more article on Wikileaks, P2P ethics, and the development of a new ethics of sharing, equality, and meaning is due here.)

The talk of shared discourses shifts our discussion from Part Two to Part Three, Streets, marking the third moment: when people with a shared global consciousness, enabled by digital networks, begin taking to the streets. Already present in protests against the prosecution of Julian Assange, this movement evolves into a stronger form in the 2011 revolutions. From the Arab Springs, Spain’s 15M, to the global Occupy movement, one finds a similar thesis: technological networks are today’s main catalyst for global revolutions. From Networks to the Streets by Aline Carvalho explores how such shared narratives in digital networks allow global movements. In The Occupy Movement as a Politics for All, Alessandro Zagato examines the shift in politics from conventional representation to something virtually available to everybody. Peter Nikolaus Funke takes the examination one step further with The Current Logic of Resistance, proposing a set of logic for digital subjectivities. (Ideally, there should be one final article linking this logic back to the notion of posthuman subjects with a network-oriented approach.) Included in the appendices of this book are some experimental notes by Glenn Muschert, Experimental and Extracurricular Notes on the Network Environment, questioning the very notion of networks and networked discourses itself, and Junghua-Liu’s artist statement for his Wi-Fi Cyborg project, a part of which is this book’s cover artwork. The two essays, although developed independently of one another, can be read perfectly complimentarily, the latter developing for the former a highly contextual example for the scope of discussion in this book."