We Have Never Been Non-Hybrid: The Cyborg as Our Existential Mode in the Posthuman Age
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As technoscience becomes significant part of human life and body, traditional discourses of liberal humanism based on purification, placing things into one of two oppositional poles, such as nature or society, no longer properly articulate the human subject in that changed environment. Posthumanism, which centers the relationship between the human and technoscience in its discourses, is replacing liberal humanist discourses. This essay offers cyborg as the posthuman subject. In doing so, the essay explores that the cyborg, a cybernetic hybrid of the human and the nonhuman, the organic and the nonorganic, and the material and the discursive, is not a revolutionary entity in order to maintain that the human subject has never been non-hybrid. Although the modern made hybrids invisible and unrepresentable, hybrid beings have always existed, and recently posthumanism foregrounds hybridity of the human subject through the image of cyborg. The cyborg used to be considered a postmodern model of the human subject. But this essay refuses that claim, showing that the postmodern is not real since even the modern based on purification is false as Bruno Latour argues, and also pointing out that postmodern theories cannot accommodate hybridity of the posthuman since it does not explain the materiality of the body, or bodily embodiment. The cyborg, as a model of the posthuman, is a historical text displaying how human beings are hybridized in the technoscience age.
Abstract
As technoscience becomes significant part of human life and body, traditional discourses of liberal humanism based on purification, placing things into one of two oppositional poles, such as nature or society, no longer properly articulate the human subject in that changed environment. Posthumanism, which centers the relationship between the human and technoscience in its discourses, is replacing liberal humanist discourses. This essay offers cyborg as the posthuman subject. In doing so, the essay explores that the cyborg, a cybernetic hybrid of the human and the nonhuman, the organic and the nonorganic, and the material and the discursive, is not a revolutionary entity in order to maintain that the human subject has never been non-hybrid. Although the modern made hybrids invisible and unrepresentable, hybrid beings have always existed, and recently posthumanism foregrounds hybridity of the human subject through the image of cyborg. The cyborg used to be considered a postmodern model of the human subject. But this essay refuses that claim, showing that the postmodern is not real since even the modern based on purification is false as Bruno Latour argues, and also pointing out that postmodern theories cannot accommodate hybridity of the posthuman since it does not explain the materiality of the body, or bodily embodiment. The cyborg, as a model of the posthuman, is a historical text displaying how human beings are hybridized in the technoscience age.
참고문헌 (18)
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