Noreen's E-learning and Digital Cultures Blog

My secondary reading this week, like several other people’s, has revolved around Coyle and Muri, I suspect because their articles were slightly more accessible than some of the other offerings. Having said that, they were still very interesting and Muri, particularly, reassured me that my final assignment topic of the use of narrative in cyberculture was a fruitful area for study.

Coyle’s study of the reactions of New Zealanders to biotechnology was a good anti-dote to the more abstract musings of Haraway and Coyle. It explored the idea of the sanctity of the human body, the boundaries between human, animal and technology and New Zealanders’ relationship with nature. Technology seemed to be regarded on a spectrum between ‘posthuman pollution’ and necessary progress, a part of human evolution. It also explored, for the first time in all the readings, spirituality and religion in relation to these ideas, the absence of which had puzzled me in earlier readings.

Views about human’s place or status on the planet as either ‘god-like’ and in control – using nature to improve mankind’s lot or as a part of a larger scheme or design planned by nature, into which we should fit and live in harmony with plants and animals. However, a large proportion of people in the study were pro-science in the sense that they saw the role of science as manipulating nature to improve human health, longevity and day-to-day living. Science and technology became more problematic when it moved into areas which seemed to change the ‘nature’ of the human being, to go beyond the merely preventative, in terms of disease or the restorative, in terms of prosthetics. The logical conclusion of some technological developments were not always seen as desirable and Virilio and Fukuyama were introduced as examples of two theorists who had explored the dystopian vision of such developments.

“Simply, posthumanism refers to a series of reconceptualizations of the rapidly changing relationships between the conditions of human embodiment and technoscience(Waldby 2000 ).”

Muri, on the other hand, is amazed that the academic theorising about human embodiment and its disappearance fails to notice the huge growth in the number of actual human bodies on the planet and suggests that in the face of this reality, cyborg theories like Haraway and Hayles are more in the region of literary symbolism or fantasy.

“Why did academics embrace the obviously fictional construct of technologically disembodied consciousness?” Muri (2003)

Muri’s answer to this question is to suggest that the cyborg has been a ‘prop’ used to pursue various agendas and that ‘disembodiment’ is largely a literary production, a discursive tradition. This struck a chord with me and brought together several threads ‘dropped’ in Haraway, Hayles and Shields. The term ‘cyborg’ came from science fiction literature originally and all of these theorists acknowledge that. I wonder if science and technology just don’t possess the necessary discourse to explore ideas beyond known facts and that in order to think ‘ outside the box’, the much more flexible and imaginative parameters of fiction and the humanities allow this? This is what I hope to explore in more detail in my final assignment – the idea that ‘narrative’ is an essential, fundamental necessity for human beings – the only way for them to think and explore themselves and the world around them?