Le Manifeste Cyborg de Donna Haraway est sans aucun doute le texte qui revient le plus souvent dans les théories cyberféministes. Celles qui travaillent dans le milieu des technologies de l’information, de la cyberculture, de la cybernétique, etc. iront peut-être même jusqu’à dire que l’image du cyborg a été trop utilisée et qu’il y a une saturation, un écoeurement qui s’installe. Cependant, même si certains trouvent cet essai démodé, on ne peut présumer que tout le monde en a fait la lecture. D’ailleurs l’impact et le pouvoir catalyseur qu’il a eu au niveau de l’imaginaire collectif en font un incontournable. Préparer un numéro sur le cyborg et omettre de parler de Haraway est impossible puisque c’est sa définition, l’hybride de l’organisme et de la machine, qui a été retenue par la plupart des penseurs de notre époque. C’est pourquoi le comité de rédaction de .dpi a jugé opportun d’y retourner, afin de retracer le cheminement qu’a fait le cyborg depuis 20 ans et de saisir son influence en 2005. Nous vous encourageons donc fortement de vous en imprimer une copie et de relire le manifeste pour vous mettre en appétit avant de savourer pleinement notre gueuleton cyborg.

Dans cette édition spéciale nous examinons deux aspects du cyborg : d’une part, la culture du cyborg et les formes sous lesquelles on le trouve aujourd’hui; d’autre part, la manière dont la figure du cyborg présente de nouvelles façons de repenser notre condition et de nous réinventer en tant que femmes.
Au menu .dpi :
Sheryl Hamilton écrit sur la pertinence et l’impertinence du cyborg de Haraway vingt ans après sa conception.
Marie-Christiane Mathieu explore les possibilités des architectures fluides (comme celle de l’Internet) et des espaces interstitiels créés par la rencontre du corps et de l’espace, dans l’Aître.
Joey Berzowska, artiste et chercheure, nous parle de son travail avec les textiles électroniques.

En tant que rédactrice/coordinatrice de .dpi, je suis parfois présumée être une sommité du cyberféminisme. Mais, à vrai dire, jusqu’à récemment je n’avais même pas lu le Manifeste Cyborg et j’avais peu de connaissances sur les ressources, articles et théories cyberféministes. Parfois le monde académique peut être intimidant et j’ai toujours été une “faiseuse” plutôt qu’une théoricienne. Cependant, en préparant ce numéro j’ai pris connaissance de plusieurs articles très intéressants ce qui a réaffirmé ma croyance qu’il est nécessaire d’avoir un lieu de discussion et d’échange afin de réellement profiter des possibilités de réinvention offertes aux femmes par le biais des nouvelles technologies. Suivant le chemin tracé par l’OBN (Old Boys Network), .dpi souhaite ouvrir les débats cyberféministes à une communauté plus étendue. Comme Faith Wilding en a fait l’observation juste dans son article Where is the Feminism in Cyberfeminism?

“ Cybergrrlish lines of flight are important as vectors of investigation, research, invention, and affirmation. But these can’t replace the hard work that is needed to identify and change the gendered structures, content, and effects of the new technologies on women worldwide. (!) But if grrrl energy and invention were to be coupled with engaged political theory and practice… Imagine!
Imagine cyberfeminists theorists teaming up with brash and cunning grrl netartists to visualize new female representations of bodies, languages, and subjectivities in cyberspace! Currently (in the US) there is little collaboration between academic feminist theorists, feminist artists, and popular women’s culture on the Net. What would happen if these groups worked together to visualize and interpret new theory, and circulate it in accessible popular forms? “

Je suis d’avis que .dpi offre un espace accessible dans lequel ce genre de rencontre (entre les théoriciennes féministes, les artistes féministes et la cyberculture populaire) peut se faire. Nous cherchons effectivement à créer une discussion continue qui permettrait d’alimenter la création des femmes sur le web. Dans cet esprit, nous avons parsemé ce numéro de toutes sortes de liens utiles. Maintenant, gavez-vous de lectures, nourrissez votre esprit et n’oubliez pas de partager vos propres recettes sur le blogue!

Lisez le Manifeste Cyborg :
http://www.stanford.edu/dept/HPS/Haraway/CyborgManifesto.html
(version originale en anglais)
http://www.cyberfeminisme.org/txt/cyborgmanifesto.htm
(pour la traduction française de Marie-Hélène Dumas, Charlotte Gould et Nathalie Magnan)
http://multitudes.samizdat.net/article.php3?id_article=800
(pour la traduction française de Anne Djoshkoukian)

Lorsque l’on participe à une expérience réseau on est saisi par l’intensité qu’elle produit. Travailler, échanger avec une communauté répartie sur le vaste territoire géographique qui attend de nous un signal, un feed-back, une participation soutenue donne une sensation très puissante. Tout à coup nous faisons corps avec une entité active qui déploie ses stratégies au sol via une panoplie d’appareils numériques qui connectent et animent à distance. Mise au point pour commander, contrôler et communiquer, c’est une machine de guerre prise en main par les grandes corporations et les gouvernements que nous utilisons. Nous agissons dans un espace sauvage où il faut sans cesse prouver notre innocence afin d’en négocier l’accès. Loin du Net95 où l’éthique d’Internet s’ancrait dans une volonté d’ouverture et de liberté, les politiques qui régissent désormais le réseau imposent leurs lois de contrôle toutes empreintes de protectionnisme bien camouflé sous la Menace qui nous guette. Suivant le mode ubiquitaire développé par les cybernéticiens qui comprirent dès les années 1940 que la diffusion de l’information était plus importante que la présence physique et que là où portait la parole et les idées s’étendait aussi le contrôle et, indirectement, l’existence physique de l’Homme, Internet offre un espace bipolaire qui ne peut être gouverné car comme l’a écrit Lawrence Lessig dans Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace, sa raison d’être est de résister à la régulation. C’est un espace que l’on infiltre et dans lequel il y a toujours possibilité d’invention et d’action.

Espace à échelle variable le réseau numérique se caractérise par son élasticité, sa pliabilité et sa capacité à se résorber en un instant. Il transgresse les standards et les normes de nos architectures rigides, s’infiltre partout, s’adapte et disparaît en un seul click! Il se fait et se défait selon les besoins, les événements, les ressources disponibles. Résultat d’une configuration d’appareils numériques qui permet la cyberception, il fusionne l’intérieur et l’extérieur. Il est qualifié de liquide, de fluide et de poreux.

Aborder le dedans et le dehors des réseaux et les liens possibles entre les deux, nous entraîne dans une redéfinition des codes informatiques et architecturaux. De quel intérieur et de quel extérieur parlons-nous? Si nous parlons de l’intérieur du réseau nous parlons sans doute de l’intersubjectivité qui se réfère aux individus et à leur capacité d’échanger leurs idées. Ainsi, parler de réseau nous amène à réfléchir à la personne qui est connectée, à ses émotions et ses intuitions, bref à sa subjectivité. Contrairement à l’objectivité qui est organisée et structurée dans un cadre social empreint de codes, de conventions et de distanciation, “l’objectivité existe en dehors de l’esprit” ¹.., la subjectivité varie selon les choses qui arrivent. “Elle donne la primauté aux états de conscience que les phénomènes suscitent” ² . L’apparition de l’Internet nous invite à considérer alors un troisième espace, subjectif et objectif en même temps. L’Internet, comme le télégraphe et le téléphone, est un système vectoriel qui connecte des relations dispersées. Par contre, contrairement au télégraphe et au téléphone, il est un monde à lui seul. Plus qu’un simple service d’échange, il est dans nos vies un espace viable dans lequel nous passons du temps. Cet espace peut être perçu comme un espace utopique dans lequel nous partageons avec une communauté virtuelle, “comme si dans ces moments, précisément, toute forme de séparation ou de fragmentation de notre conscience se trouvait miraculeusement abolie” ³ . Ce mode de fonctionnement repose sur la vision édénique de la communication, de l’être et du “penser ensemble”, du Mind at large tel qu’avancé par Gregory Baterson. Mais c’est aussi le lieu d’une nouvelle solitude qui obéit à une économie de l’ego en répondant à l’insistance politico-économique des gouvernements et des entreprises qui transforment la cité en espaces rentables délaissant le citoyen, son client ⁴, spectateur de sa propre existence. Le réseau relie des individualités éloignées. Être seul tout en étant connecté aux autres, collaborer tout en restant isolé, le réseau crée de la proximité dispersée.

Cet univers hybride et transversal délaisse les lois rigides de la géométrie euclidienne, de la logique du subjectif et de l’objectif, de l’intérieur et de l’extérieur en effaçant les différences naturelles et artificielles des prothèses électroniques et du corps humain. Cette fusion de l’espace vectoriel, de l’organisme vivant et de sa subjectivité échappe aux correspondances formelles établies par le modèle anthropomorphique pour s’orienter vers une forme relationnelle “qui génère des liens, et qui resserre l’espace des relations” ⁵ . On fait coexister différents systèmes dont les capacités de connections et d’interactions prévalent sur une définition formelle fixe en considérant la machine et l’homme sur un niveau égal, évalués non sur leur capacité à se ressembler physiquement mais sur celle de pouvoir communiquer.

In this way the body becomes an inter-media surface, the field for a dual experience between real space and virtual space which thereby acquires a new single dimension. And this dislocation of the corporeal experience can open the way to a new interrogation of the world and ourselves and, consequently, the possible ways of being a body that-becomes-space.⁶

Tout comme le Cyborg de Donna Haraway, cet hybride de nature, résultat de l’amalgame d’espaces, d’identités et de technologies, qui s’applique à conclure la fin de l’Homme – incarnation emblématique de l’Occident – en détournant les visées de la machine de guerre afin de produire un engagement social, notre corps s’intègre au réseau comme un élément communiquant et se dissout dans l’aire de travail où il y a échange, collaboration et action. Le virtuel rencontre le réel pour créer une entité dont les participants actifs mesurent l’ampleur. On est devant un aître (aire+être) hors du commun qui possède ses propres règles et dont le pivot se consolide autour d’un projet précis. Emprunté à Henry Maldiney et Georges Didi-Huberman, le concept d’aître englobe l’hétérogénéité et les incongruités propres au réseau. Georges Didi-Huberman le décrit ainsi:

Peut-être faudrait-il, pour en mieux saisir l’enjeu, convoquer le mot anachronique d’aître, qui a la particularité phonétique, en français, de retourner une notion de lieu sur une question d’être. Ce mot a d’abord signifié un lieu ouvert, un porche, un passage, un parvis extérieur (l’étymologie invoque le latin etcetera) ; il s’emploie également pour désigner un terrain libre servant de charnier ou de cimetière ; il s’utilise aussi pour nommer la disposition interne des diverses parties d’une habitation; il a fini par désigner l’intimité d’un être, son for intérieur, l’abysse même de sa pensée.⁷

L’aître est un lieu de passage d’un état et d’une position à une autre, d’une existence à une autre. Il propose un habitat à membrane filtrante et infiltrante. Il est tout à l’image de la matrice qui n’existe ni pour elle-même ni par elle-même mais qui transforme le projet selon l’intervention d’une tierce partie. On pourrait dire qu’il est semblable au concept de l’intervalle qui considère le temps comme un espace d’action et l’individu comme élément indéterminant, c’est-à-dire un élément qui propose un nombre infini de solutions et influence de façon imprévisible le devenir du projet. L’aître ouvre sur une très belle utopie, celle de la fusion de l’espace pratiqué et de l’espace intérieur de l’individu, habitacle fluide et extrêmement communiquant. Utopie rafraîchissante qui fait écho aux propos d’Elizabeth Grosz et de Luce Irigaray qui, contestant la rigidité des architectures contemporaines, lesquelles enferment et cloisonnent, revendiquent des espaces potentiels plus aptes à accommoder le mouvement, les changements et la circulation. Utopie qui ouvre la voie à de nouvelles manières d’habiter et de communiquer avec le monde afin de mieux intervenir sur celui-ci.

To produce an architecture in which "women can live" (to use Irigaray's formulation) is to produce both a domestic and a civic architecture as envelop, which permits the passage from one space and position to another, rather that the containment of objects and functions in which each thing finds its rightful place. Building would not function as finished object but rather as spatial process, open to whatever use it may be put to in an indeterminate future, not as a container of solids but as a facilitator of flows: “volume without contour”, as Irigaray describes it in Speculum.⁸

Comme l’a dit Roy Ascott, “Tu es dedans ou tu es nulle part et quand tu es dedans, tu es partout” ⁹. Nous sommes donc en présence de productions éphémères qui permettent une recréation constante du lieu et de la communauté, une réinvention continuelle du quotidien et des relations qui en définissent le volume. Nous sommes devant une foullitude d’états-naissants qui arrivant à maturité disparaissent pour renaître ailleurs, libres et mobiles.

L’aître prend sa dimension dans les embranchements du réseau, il communique par l’entremise de parois de plus en plus minces, de plus en plus sensibles. Nos ordinateurs deviennent des alcôves qui nous isolent pour mieux nous transporter. En considérant les particularités du réseau avec ces multiples interfaces et les rapports à la matérialité qu’elles modifient, nous ne pouvons qu’anticiper le reste, architectures aux parois poreuses qui permettent les passages d’états et de lieux; réseau d’appareils interconnectés qui se déploie sur le territoire, dans le réel, en regroupant les ressources et les idées à distance pour mieux intervenir autre part… De l’industriel et du militaire nous passons au domestique. Nos demeures deviennent à leur tour des noeuds, points de jonction et de relation, des habitacles dans lesquelles nous nous glissons comme dans un vêtement pour ne faire qu’un. Nous nous infiltrons pour mieux nous propager.

Aître ou ne pas aître? En devenant des aîtres nous vivons des intensités. Nous nous répartissons sur le vaste territoire géographique qui attend de nous un signal, un feed-back, une participation soutenue. Nous devenons une entité d’actions qui déploie ses mécanismes au sol via une panoplie d’appareils qui connectent et animent à distance. Fruit d’agencements technologiques mis au point pour commander, contrôler et communiquer, nous sommes une machine de guerre. Nous agissons dans un espace sauvage où il faut sans cesse prouver notre innocence afin d’en négocier l’accès. Mais nous ne pouvons être gouvernées car notre raison d’aître est de résister à la régulation.

Notes

1. Dictionnaire Hachette Multimédia © Hachette Multimédia / Hachette Livre, 2000, Version 6.0
2. Dictionnaire Hachette Multimédia © Hachette Multimédia / Hachette Livre, 2000, Version 6.0
3. Fred Forest , 1984, Manifeste pour une esthétique de la communication, disponible sur Internet à
http://www.webnetmuseum.org/html/fr/expo_retr_fredforest/textes_divers/4manifeste_esth_com_fr.htm#text
4. “Le grand défi du MRQ à l’aube de l’an 2000 consiste à rehausser la confiance des contribuables et de nos mandataires, par la qualité du travail de nos employés et par la qualité des relations avec les contribuables qui sont aussi des clients. (…)Parce que les contribuables et les mandataires du MRQ sont aussi des clients, nous sommes donc présentement à revoir nos façons de faire afin de mieux répondre aux besoins de ceux et celles que nous avons le mandat de servir avec respect et courtoisie.” NOTES EN VUE DE L’ALLOCUTION DE LA MINISTRE DELEGUEE AU REVENU MME RITA DIONNE-MARSOLAIS A L’OCCASION DU 23E CONGRES DE L’ASSOCIATION DE PLANIFICATION FISCALE ET FINANCIERE (APFF)
MONTREAL, LE 8 OCTOBRE 1998
5. Nicolas Bourriaud, 2001, Esthétique relationnel, p 14.
6. Marie Luisa Palumbo, 2000, New Wombs, Electronic Bodies and Architectural Disorders, p65.
7. Georges Didi-Huberman, 2000, Etre Crâne, lieu, contact, pensée, sculpture, Les Éditions de Minuit p 32
8. Elizabeth Grosz, 2001, Architecture from the Outside, Essays on Virtual and Real Space, p.164.
9. Roy Ascott, 1995 "Télénoïa" in Esthétique des arts médiatiques

It’s hard to believe that it has been twenty years since Donna Haraway first published, “A Manifesto for Cyborgs: Science, Technology, and Socialist Feminism in the 1980s” (the Cyborg Manifesto_). Reworked once, reprinted dozens of times, and cited immeasurably often, it rightly takes its place in the pantheon of great essays. The Cyborg Manifesto stands beside Roland Barthes’ “The Death of the Author,” Walter Benjamin’s “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” and of course Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels’ The Communist Manifesto as a work whose invocation has become a signifier in its own right, while the content fades in memory and perhaps significance.

In that essay, Haraway has the distinction of having mobilised one of the most prolific, powerful, and purloined metaphors of technoculture : the cyborg. While the term cyborg itself, was coined by Manfred Clynes in the 1960s to describe the adaptation of humans to life in space (see Clynes and Kline 1995), it was the Cyborg Manifesto that introduced the unruly hybrid to social theory. Haraway defined the cyborg as a “cybernetic organism, a hybrid of machine and organism, a creature of social reality as well as a creature of fiction” (1985: 65). She offered the cyborg as a political fiction for mapping the boundary effacement between humans and animals and humans and machines. Ironic, unruly, and illegitimate, the cyborg revelled in the pleasures of promiscuous couplings with technology, sought a politics of affinity, and incited women to embrace a relationship with technology.

Scott Bukatman recognises that “Donna Haraway has extensively rethought the emergence of the cyborg in the mid-twentieth century, and the very term has become nearly synonymous with her formulations” (1993: 321). Many other scholars concur (Hicks, 2002; Flanagan and Booth, 2002; Gray, et al., 1985; Gray 2001; Davis-Floyd and Dumit, 1998; Wolmark, 1999). The metaphor has eclipsed the original essay in circulation, if not complexity. Virtually any body-machine encounter can be, and has been, labelled cyborgian. As Heather Hicks notes, “[t]hose of us who think and write about contemporary literature and culture may at times begin to feel that we have reached ‘cyborg’ saturation” (2002: 86). She goes on however, to advocate (although not demonstrate), the cyborg’s continued relevance. “[H]owever faddish the regular recycling of this trope may begin to appear, its staying power suggests its usefulness as an intellectual rallying point for all of us who find contemporary cultural transformations too astonishing and dramatic to warrant anything less than the special effect that is the cyborg metaphor” (ibid.). Yet, staying power alone does not prove usefulness. Particularly on this, her twentieth anniversary, I suggest that we shouldn’t easily forget that both the cyborg and her parent manifesto were “born” in the mid-1980s.

A feminist call to techno-arms, targeted at the jacuzzi Marxists reading the Socialist Review, focused on rethinking socialist feminist practice and interrogating practices like the homework economy, the essay is very much of its place. It is also an inevitable creature of its time; after all, it was pre-WWW, pre- the widespread adoption of PCs, pre-Dolly, pre-the Human Genome Project, pre- the Gulf War : It is fair to ask, indeed we need to ask, two questions: Does anyone care about the cyborg anymore? Should we?

In 1997, I published an article exploring what I then called the “not-so-surprising half-life of the Cyborg Manifesto,” the body of thought since 1985 (feminist and otherwise) that has taken up the cyborg (Hamilton, 1997). I suggested we could see several trends. First, the Cyborg Manifesto served as a theoretical and historical limit point; second, it was casually evoked as a ‘pro-technology’ feminist position; third, that induced as a conflation of representation and practice; fourth, that a science fictional aesthetic dominated that writing; and finally, that the cyborg had become a powerful construct in the analysis of bodies and technologies within feminist theory and research. Within the feminist literature I suggested three streams were evident where the cyborg was read as: a metaphor to theorise bodies and technologies, as a fantastic construct to examine representations, and as a literal being in order to consider gendered technological practices.

Since that time, it is clear that people still care about the cyborg. The intellectual activity I discerned in the cyborg’s first decade continues, as do many of the trends I identified. The cyborg as trope continues to decorate analyses about everything from Prozac to genetically modified foodstuffs, to brain-machine interfacing, to moral theory, to citizenship, to artificial insemination. We continue to see within technocultural writing the “add-cyborg-and-stir” recipe for immediate hipness (eg. Schmidt and Moore, 1998); body artists Orlan and Stelarc continue (amazingly) to generate intellectual attention as apparently the only two incarnations of literal cyborgs (Zylinska, 2002); and the Matrix, the Borg in Star Trek, and AI have replaced Robocop, The Lawnmower Man, and the Terminator series as the darlings of filmic cyborgia.

This proliferation of “cyborgology” as Gray et al. (1995) would call it may answer the question : does anyone still care? Clearly they do. It does not, however, answer the question of whether or not we should. This ongoing intellectual activity tends to accept the cyborg at face value, with the effect, surely unintended by Haraway, that the cyborg has become iconic, archetypical, and hence frozen in time, static. Can the cyborg continue to offer cyber- and other feminists, as well as others interested, technoculture, political, intellectual or creative resources? I briefly explore three sites where we can see the ongoing pertinence and perspicacity of the cyborg: biotechnology, posthumanism, and the Cyborg Manifesto itself.

Kathleen Woodward (1994) correctly suggests that too much attention in technocultural writing has been spent on communications technology, at the expense of biotechnology. She recognises the Cyborg Manifesto as a key source in rectifying this while noting that Haraway had to virtually “smuggle” biotechnology in (155). Treatments of the cyborg have been overly focused on “hard” technology, at the expense of “soft” technology, reluctant to take up the science element of technoscience. Cultural criticism and theory have been slow to take up biotechnology at all, and slower still to look to the cyborg as a helpful figure in its interrogation. Biotechnological science offers material instantiations of the boundary trouble between humans and animals, between human and machine. Transnational bioscience industries are producing hybrid beings that are far more troubling and interesting than Orlan ever was or could be. Disturbingly, however, the panic around the assault on the singular status of the human being in the order of things as a result of developments in biotechnology is obscuring issues of gender difference. W.J.T. Mitchell (2003), for example, examines what he calls biocybernetic reproduction, exploring the tensions between nature and culture, between genetic originals and copies, and takes up a series of cyborg films, all the while completely ignoring or side-stepping the gender implications of biocybernetic reproduction. And he’s not alone. What better work for the cyborg than to help us to examine the gender implications and politics within biotechnological practices that are materialising “these potent and taboo fusions” (Haraway, 1985: 90).

A second cultural site where the cyborg is implicit and yet unrecognised is in popular and intellectual explorations of posthumans and posthumanism. From N. Katherine Hayles’ classic, How We Became Post Human: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature and Informatics (1999) to the wildest claims of the Extropians (a transhumanist fringe group where science and technology are advocated as a means to transcend human biological limits), there has been an explosion of interest in things posthuman. Without getting into debates about hyphens, slashes, and so on, work on the posthuman seems to fall into two broader streams: a more popular one which Eugene Thacker (2003) labels as “extropianism” and a more reflective and cautious exploration which he (borrowing from Jill Didur) calls “critical posthumanism.” Unlike many other posthuman scholars, Thacker does actually recognise Haraway as a foremother of critical posthumanism, but he does not explore why the posthuman as trope need replace the cyborg. My exploration of critical posthumanism suggests that this lack of reflection is rampant. Elaine L. Graham (2002) is perhaps the exception; she devotes an entire chapter in Representations of the Post/Human: Monsters, Aliens and Others in Popular Culture (2002) to distinguishing hers from a more cyborgian approach. She argues that in Haraway’s maintenance of an opposition between human and divine, the cyborg is unduly limited. However, even after a chapter devoted to that argument, I wasn’t fully convinced that the cyborg as a broader cultural figure was necessarily doomed by the alleged, latent Roman Catholicism of its author.

I suggest that the cyborg has more to say to the critical posthumanists. Bart Simon, editor of a 2003 special issue of Cultural Critique on posthuman futures asks: “How does one disentangle the critical potential of hybrid subjectivity from the corporate technoscientific practice of producing hybrids so well suited to the needs of global capitalism?” (4). Was this not the very raison d‘être of the cyborg?

Finally, the third site where I suggest we can explore the ongoing relevance of the cyborg is in the original Cyborg Manifesto. Let’s revel in claims like, “the cyborg is resolutely committed to partiality, irony, intimacy, and perversity. It is oppositional, utopian, and completely without innocence” (Haraway, 1985: 67). As feminists, let’s consider the argument that “we require regeneration not rebirth, and the possibilities for our reconstitution include the utopian dream of the hope for a monstrous world without gender” (ibid. 100). Or the claim that “cyborg imagery can suggest a way out of the maze of dualisms in which we have explained our bodies and our tools to ourselves” (ibid. 100-101). Why don’t we take up the challenge: “my cyborg myth is about transgressed boundaries, potent fusions, and dangerous possibilities which progressive people might explore as one part of needed political work” (ibid. 71).

“What might be learned from personal and political ‘technological’ pollution?” (ibid. 93) remains a potent question. I am a cyberfeminist who teaches graduate courses in gender and technology. I had stopped assigning the Cyborg Manifesto as a reading because of what I perceived to be its datedness (aesthetically at least and perhaps intellectually and politically), the students’ cynicism with all things cyber-, and my own frustration with how the cyborg has come to mean everything and hence nothing in current technoculture. This year, approaching the 20th anniversary, I put it back on the course outline of my doctoral seminar. The students ranged from a young woman just entering her Master’s degree to a grandmother pursuing her doctorate. Surprisingly to me, none had read the essay before. Almost as surprising to me, the students loved it. Each had a completely different interpretation of what was important and predictably, they were frustrated and provoked by it. Most importantly, though, they found it relevant to their own lives with technology. The most poignant moment came when one woman told us that it was upon reading this essay that she could feel proud of the steel rods in her spine, placed there when she was a girl to straighten her spine. She felt empowered to be cyborg and suggested, tears in her eyes, that had she been able to read and understand the essay as a young girl, her adolescence would have been much easier. My cynicism with the cyborg was humbled. Obviously I still have things to learn from the cyborg.

It’s the 20th anniversary of a feminist figure that continues to have a lot to say to our current experience, as women (and men), with technoscience. Why not treat yourself? Go back and reread the Cyborg Manifesto.

Happy birthday Cyborg! I wish you many happy returns.

Works Cited

Bukatman, Scott (1993), Terminal Identity: The Virtual Subject in Post-modern Fiction (Durham and London: Duke University Press.

Clynes, Manfred E. and Nathan S. Kline (1995), “Cyborgs and Space” in The Cyborg Handbook (Chris Hables Gray, et al., eds.), New York and London: Routledge, pp. 29-33.

Davis-Floyd, Robbie and Joseph Dumit, eds. (1998), Cyborg Babies: From Techno-Sex to Techno-Tots, New York: Routledge.

Booth, Austin and Mary Flanagan (2002), “Introduction” in Reload: Rethinking Women + Cyberculture (Mary Flanagan and Austin Booth, eds.), Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, pp. 1-24.

Graham, Elaine L. (2002), Representations of the Post/Human: Monsters, Aliens and Others in Popular Culture, New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press.

Gray, Chris Hables et al., eds. (1995), The Cyborg Handbook, New York: Routledge.

Gray, Chris Hables (2001), Cyborg Citizen: Politics in the Posthuman Age, New York: Routledge.

Hamilton, Sheryl N. (1998), “The Cyborg 11 Years Later: The Not-So-Amazing Half-Life of the Cyborg Manifesto” in Convergence: The Journal of Research Into New Media Technologies 3(2): 104-120.

Haraway, Donna J. (1985), “A Manifesto for Cyborgs: Science, Technology, and Socialist Feminism in the 1980s” in The Socialist Review 80: 65-106.

Hayles, N. Katherine (1999), How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics, Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press.

Hicks, Heather (2002), “Striking cyborgs: Reworking the ‘Human’ in Marge Piercy’s He, She and It“ in Reload: Rethinking Women + Cyberculture (Mary Flanagan and Austin Booth, eds.), Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, pp. 85-106.

Schmidt, Matthew and Lisa Jean Moore (1998), “Constructing a ‘Good Catch,’ Picking a Winner: The Development of Technosemen and the Deconstruction of the Monolithic Male” in Cyborg Babies: From Techno-Sex to Techno-Tots (Robbie Davis-Floyd and Joseph Dumit, eds.), New York: Routledge, pp. 21-21-39.

Simon, Bart (2003), “Introduction: Toward a Critique of Posthuman Futures” in Cultural Critique 53:1-9.

Thacker, Eugene (2003), “Data Made Flesh: Biotechnology and the Discourse of the Posthuman” in Cultural Critique 53: 72-97.

Wolmark, Jenny, ed. (1999), Cybersexualities: A Reader on Feminist Theory, Cyborgs and Cyberspace, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.

Woodward, Kathleen (1994), “From Virtual Cyborgs to Biological Time Boms: Technocriticism and the Material Body” in Culture on the Brink: Ideologies of Technology (Gretchen Bender and Timothy Druckrey, eds.), Seattle: Bay Press, pp. 47-64.

Zylinska, Joanna, ed. (2002), The Cyborg Experiments: The Extensions of the Body in the Media Age, London: Continuum.

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Difficile de croire que vingt années déjà se sont écoulées depuis la première publication par Donna Haraway de « A Manifesto for Cyborgs: Science, Technology, and Socialist Feminism in the 1980s » (le Manifeste cyborg). Retravaillé une fois, réimprimé des douzaines de fois et cité par un nombre incalculable d'auteurs, cet essai occupe à juste titre une place de choix au panthéon des grands essais. À l'instar de La mort de l'auteur de Roland Barthes, de L'œuvre d'art à l'époque de sa reproduction mécanisée de Walter Benjamin et, bien sûr, du Manifeste du parti communiste de Karl Marx et Freidrich Engels, le Manifeste cyborg est une œuvre dont la simple évocation est chargée de sens mais dont on tend à oublier le contenu et, éventuellement, la portée réelle.

Haraway a le mérite d'avoir mobilisé dans cet essai l'une des métaphores les plus fécondes, les plus fortes mais aussi les plus souvent reprises de la technoculture : le cyborg. De fait, si le terme même de cyborg a été introduit par Manfred Clynes dans les années 60 afin de décrire l'adaptation des humains à la vie dans l'espace (voir Clynes and Kline, 1995), c'est le Manifeste cyborg qui a introduit cet hybride insubordonné en théorie sociale. Haraway définit le cyborg comme un organisme cybernétique, un hybride de machine et d'organisme, une créature de la réalité sociale aussi bien qu'une créature de l'imaginaire »¹. Elle a présenté le modèle du cyborg comme une fiction politique permettant de rendre visible la disparition progressive des frontières séparant les humains des animaux et des machines. Ironique, insubordonné et atypique, le cyborg savourait les plaisirs de couplages hétéroclites avec la technologie, recherchait une politique de l'affinité et incitait les femmes à entrer en relation avec la technologie.

Scott Bukatman reconnaît que « Donna Haraway a considérablement repensé l'émergence du cyborg au milieu du vingtième siècle, et que le terme même du cyborg est devenu presque synonyme de ses formulations » ². Plusieurs autres chercheurs sont d'ailleurs du même avis (par exemple Hicks, 2002; Flanagan et Booth, 2002; Gray, et al., 1985; Gray 2001; Davis-Floyd et Dumit, 1998; Wolmark, 1999). Pour ce qui est de sa diffusion et de sa complexité , la métaphore a éclipsé l'essai initial. À peu de choses près, toute rencontre du corps et de la machine peut être et a été étiquetée de « cyborgienne ». Comme le souligne Heather Hicks, « [t]hose of us who think and write about contemporary literature and culture may at times begin to feel that we have reached 'cyborg saturation'» (2002: 86). Elle poursuit toutefois en avançant (mais sans en faire la démonstration) que la figure du cyborg s'avère encore aujourd'hui pertinente ; « [H]owever faddish the regular recycling of this trope may begin to appear, its staying power suggests its usefulness as an intellectual rallying point for all of us who find contemporary cultural transformations too astonishing and dramatic to warrant anything less than the special effect that is the cyborg metaphor » (ibid.). Or, la longue vie du cyborg ne suffit pas à faire la preuve de son utilité. Il me semble important, spécialement au moment de leur vingtième anniversaire, de ne pas perdre de vue que le cyborg et son manifeste d'origine sont tous deux « nés » au milieu des années 80.

Appel féministe aux « techno-armes », s'adressant aux lecteurs marxistes embourgeoisés du Socialist Review, cherchant à redéfinir la pratique socialiste féministe et à interroger des pratiques telles que la « homework economy », l'essai avait une orientation très claire. Il s'agit aussi inévitablement d'un produit de son temps ; après tout, il s'insère dans un contexte pré- WWW, pré- adoption gé né ralisée des PC, pré- Dolly, pré – Projet Génome Humain, pré – Guerre du Golf! Et lorsqu'il est question de technologie, on nous a appris que le temps compte. Il semble donc légitime et même essentiel de nous poser deux questions : y a-t-il aujourd'hui des gens toujours intéressés par le cyborg ? Devrions-nous l'être ?

En 1997, j'ai publié un article explorant ce que je nommais alors la « not-so-surprising half-life of the Cyborg Manifesto », c'est-à-dire l'ensemble des réflexions (féministes et autres) s'étant développées autour du cyborg depuis 1985 (Hamilton, 1997). Je suggérais alors que plusieurs effets discursifs étaient manifestes, dans le champ plus large de la cyberthéorie. Premièrement, le Manifeste cyborg a servi de point limite à la fois théorique et historique; deuxièmement, il exprime une position féministe « pro-technologie »; troisièmement, il convainc en faisant la synthèse entre la représentation et la pratique; quatrièmement, une esthétique de science fiction domine cet écrit; et, finalement, le cyborg est devenu un concept porteur pour l'analyse des corps et des technologies dans la théorie et la recherche féministes. J'avançais en outre qu'à l'intérieur de la littérature féministe se profilaient trois courants distincts quant à l'interprétation du cyborg : le cyborg en tant que métaphore pour théoriser corps et technologies, le cyborg en tant que construction fantastique pour examiner les représentations et le cyborg en tant qu'être permettant une réflexion sur les pratiques technologiques orientées en fonction du sexe.

Depuis ce temps, il semble évident qu'un intérêt pour le cyborg se fait toujours sentir. L'activité intellectuelle que j'avais discernée au cours de la première décennie du cyborg se poursuit, comme d'ailleurs plusieurs des tendances que j'avais alors identifiées. Le cyborg en tant que trope apparaît toujours dans une multitude d'analyses traitant autant du Prozac que des aliments génétiquement modifiés, des interfaces entre le cerveau et la machine, de la théorie morale, de la citoyenneté ou encore de l'insémination artificielle., Dans certains écrits sur la technoculture, la recette « ajouter-le-cyborg-et-brasser » pour être au goût du jour apparaît toujours (par exemple, Schmidt et Moore, 1998); les artistes corporels Orlan et Stelarc continuent (étonnamment) à susciter une certaine curiosité intellectuelle en étant les seules incarnations connues de cyborgs authentiques (Zylinska, 2002) ; la Matrice (Matrix), le Borg dans Star Trek et AI ont remplacé les séries Robocop, The Lawnmower Man et Terminator à titre de favoris de la cyborgie cinématographique.

Cette prolifération de ce que Gray et al (1995) appelleraient la « cyborgologie » peut nous permettre de répondre à une première question : y a-t-il toujours des gens qui s'intéressent au cyborg ? De toute évidence, il y en a. Reste à déterminer, si nous devrions nous y intéresser pour autant. L'activité intellectuelle continue qui se développe autour de ce modèle, considère le modèle du cyborg sans le remettre en question, ce qui a l'effet, sans doute imprévu par Haraway, de le rendre iconique, archétypal et donc figé dans le temps, statique. Le cyborg peut-il encore offrir aux cyber- et autres féministes (de mê me qu'aux autres intéressés) des ressources technoculturelles, politiques intellectuelles et créatives ? J'explorerai brièvement trois lieux où la pertinence et la perspicacité du cyborg sont aujourd'hui rendues manifestes: les biotechnologies, le posthumanisme, et le Manifeste cyborg lui-même.

Kathleen Woodward (1994) suggère avec justesse qu'une grande partie de la littérature sur la technoculture se consacre aux technologies de la communication au détriment des biotechnologies. Elle considère le Manifeste cyborg comme une référence de choix pour rectifier cette situation tout en notant au passage que c'est en quelque sorte à la dérobée que Haraway y avait introduit les biotechnologies (155). Les études sur le cyborg, peu disposées à explorer le volet scientifique de la technoscience, se sont concentrées de façon excessive sur les technologies « dures » ("hard" technology), négligeant par le fait même les technologies « molles » ("soft" technology). La critique et la théorie culturelles ont pour leur part pris un certain temps avant même de considérer la biotechnologie et ont pris encore plus longtemps avant d'envisager le cyborg comme une figure utile pour la questionner.

La science biotechnologique offre des exemples concrets de la remise en question actuelle des frontières séparant les humains des animaux et des machines. Les industries transnationales de bioscience produisent des êtres hybrides beaucoup plus perturbants et intéressants qu' Orlan ne le sera jamais. Cependant, la panique suscitée par la remise en question du statut de l'être humain due aux récents développements en biotechnologie, obscurcit les questions liées aux spécificités de chaque sexe. W.J.T. Mitchell (2003), par exemple, examine ce qu'il appelle la reproduction biocybernétique " explorant les tensions entre nature et culture ainsi qu'entre originaux et copies génétiques " et analyse une série de films cyborg tout en esquivant les implications de la reproduction biocybernétique pour les différents sexes. Et il n'est pas le seul. Y a-t-il un meilleur rôle pour le cyborg que de nous aider à considérer la politique des sexes et ses répercussions, dans les pratiques biotechnologiques matérialisant « ces fusions puissantes et taboues » ?³

Les explorations intellectuelles et populaires du posthumanisme et des posthumains forment un second lieu culturel où la présence du cyborg est implicite quoique toujours mé connue. Du classique de N. Katherine Hayles How We Became Post Human: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature and Informatics (1999) aux pré tentions les plus dé bridé es des Extropiens (un groupe transhumaniste marginal faisant la promotion de la science et de la technologie comme moyens de transcender les limites biologiques de l'ê tre humain), l'attention accordé e aux ré flexions posthumaines s'est accrue à un rythme impressionnant. Les travaux sur le posthumain semblent se diviser en deux grandes tendances : un courant plus populaire que Eugene Thacker (2003) nomme l'« extropianisme » et une approche plus réflexive et prudente qu'il appelle (empruntant le terme à Jill Didur) le « posthumanisme critique ». Contrairement à plusieurs autres chercheurs, Thacker reconnaît explicitement le rôle précurseur de Haraway dans le développement du posthumanisme critique mais ne se questionne pas sur les raisons pour lesquelles le posthumain en tant que trope devrait remplacer le cyborg. Ma propre exploration du posthumanisme critique suggère que ce manque d'analyse est en fait très ré pandu. Elaine L. Graham (2002) en repré sente peut-être l'exception, consacrant un chapitre entier de Representations of the Post/Human: Monsters, Aliens and Others in Popular Culture (2002) à différencier sa démarche d'une approche davantage cyborgienne. Elle soutient que le maintien d'une opposition entre l'humain et le divin par Haraway limite le cyborg de façon excessive. Or, un chapitre consacré à défendre cette idée n'a pas suffit à me convaincre que le cyborg en tant que figure culturelle plus large se voyait nécessairement condamné par le catholicisme, soi-disant latent chez l'auteure.

Je crois que le cyborg a encore beaucoup de choses à enseigner aux posthumanistes critiques. Bart Simon, directeur d'une parution spéciale de Cultural Critique en 2003 sur le futur du posthumain, demande : « How does one disentangle the critical potential of hybrid subjectivity from the corporate technoscientific practice of producing hybrids so well suited to the needs of global capitalism? » (4). N'était-ce pas la raison d'être même du cyborg ?

Finalement, le troisième lieu que je propose d'explorer afin de saisir toute la pertinence actuelle du cyborg est le Manifeste cyborg lui-mê me. Prenons plaisir à jouer avec des énoncés tels « le cyborg est résolument engagé dans la voie de la partialité , de l'ironie, de l'intimité et de la perversité . Il est opposant, utopique et totalement dénué d'innocence. » ⁴. En tant que féministes, considérons l'argument selon lequel « nous demandons la régénération, pas la renaissance et, dans notre reconstruction possible, il y a le rêve utopique rempli d'espoir d'un monde monstrueux qui exclut le genre. » ⁵ Ou encore l'idée que « l'imagerie cyborgienne ouvre une porte de sortie au labyrinthe des dualismes dans lesquels nous avons puisé l'explication de nos corps et de nos outils ».⁶ Pourquoi ne pas relever le défi: « Donc mon mythe cyborg concerne les frontières violées, les fusions puissantes, et les possibilités dangereuses que les progressistes pourraient explorer en tant que partie d'un travail politique nécessaire. »⁷

« Que peut-on apprendre d'une pollution "technologique" personnelle et politique ? » ⁸,
est une question qui demeure encore significative aujourd'hui . Je suis une cyberféministe qui enseigne des cours de cycles supérieurs sur le thème de « gender and technology ». J'avais cessé d'inclure le Manifeste cyborg dans la liste des lectures obligatoires pour mes cours, parce que j'avais l'impression qu'il était devenu désuet (d'un point de vue esthétique, du moins, mais peut-être aussi intellectuel et politique) et à cause du cynisme des étudiants face à tout ce qui porte l'étiquette « cyber » et de ma propre insatisfaction face à la perte progressive de sens d'un cyborg utilisé à toutes les sauces dans la technoculture actuelle. Cette année, à l'approche de son vingtième anniversaire, j'ai décidé de réintroduire ce texte dans le plan de cours de mon séminaire doctoral. Le groupe d'étudiants inscrits à ce sé minaire é tait des plus diversifiés, allant de la jeune étudiante en première session de maîtrise à la grand-mère en voie d'obtenir son doctorat. Étonnamment, personne n'avait lu l'essai auparavant. Et, à ma grande surprise, ils l'ont adoré. Chacun avait une interprétation complètement différente de ce qui était important, avec pour conséquence prévisible qu'ils étaient à la fois contrariés et interpellés par cet essai. Toutefois, ce qui est plus important est le fait qu'ils l'aient jugé pertinent à leur propre expérience de la technologie. Le moment le plus touchant fut lorsqu'une femme nous confia que la lecture de cet essai lui avait permis de se sentir fière de la barre de fer insérée, lorsqu'elle était enfant, dans sa colonne vertébrale afin de la redresser. Le cyborg lui a procuré une nouvelle emprise sur sa vie et elle a laissé entendre, les larmes aux yeux, que son adolescence aurait été beaucoup plus facile si elle avait pu lire et comprendre cet essai lorsqu'elle était encore jeune. Mon cynisme envers le cyborg s'est soudainement estompé. De toute évidence, il me reste toujours des choses à apprendre du cyborg.

C'est le vingtième anniversaire d'une figure féministe qui s'avère encore aujourd'hui des plus pertinentes afin d'éclairer notre expérience ), de la technoscience, en tant que femmes (et hommes). Pourquoi ne pas se faire plaisir ? Revisitons et relisons le Manifeste cyborg.

Joyeux anniversaire Cyborg ! Longue vie et meilleurs voeux !

…………………………………………….

NdR: Les citations d'Haraway sont empruntées à la traduction française de Anne Djoshkoukian, mise à part les citations 6 et 8 qui proviennent de la traduction de Marie Héléne Dumas, Charlotte Gould et Nathalie Magnan.

Le manifeste cyborg : la science , la technologie et le fé minisme-socialiste vers la fin du XXème siècle traduit par Anne Djoshkoukian, , première publication en septembre 1992, mise en ligne le mercredi 21 juillet 2004
http://multitudes.samizdat.net/article.php3?id_article=800

Manifeste cyborg : science, technologie et fé minisme socialiste à la fin du XXe siècle
1985. Trad. : Marie Hélène Dumas, Charlotte Gould, Nathalie Magnan.
École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-arts, Paris.
http://www.cyberfeminisme.org/txt/cyborgmanifesto.htm

1.[« cybernetic organism, a hybrid of machine and organism, a creature of social reality as well as a creature of fiction » (1985: 65)]
2.[« Donna Haraway has extensively rethought the emergence of the cyborg in the mid-twentieth century, and the very term has become nearly synonymous with her formulations » (Scott Bukatman, 1993: 321)]
3. [ « these potent and taboo fusions » (Haraway, 1985: 90)]
4. [« [t]he cyborg is resolutely committed to partiality, irony, intimacy, and perversity. It is oppositional, utopian, and completely without innocence » (Haraway, 1985: 67)]
5. « [w]e require regeneration not rebirth, and the possibilities for our reconstitution include the utopian dream of the hope for a monstrous world without gender » (ibid. 100).
6. « ©yborg imagery can suggest a way out of the maze of dualisms in which we have explained our bodies and our tools to ourselves » (ibid. 100-101)
7. « [s]o my cyborg myth is about transgressed boundaries, potent fusions, and dangerous possibilities which progressive people might explore as one part of needed political work » (ibid. 71).
8. « What might be learned from personal and political 'technological' pollution? » (ibid. 93)

Donna Haraway used Socratic irony to introduce the world to the Cyborg Manifesto and within it outlined a potential new site for feminist identity within the margins of the un-namable. She argues that the cyborg itself is a hybrid of the human and the machine and thus can claim no creation mythology. Without the desire to return to the garden, as outlined within Judeo-Christian and psychoanalytic mythologies, “the cyborg skips the step of original unity, of identification with nature in the western sense” *: these new creatures would be free to self-define.

Seeking self definition is the goal here, as Haraway recognised the potential for “exclusion through naming” as well as the fluid nature with which most selves are in a constant state of becoming. Identity with nature had not served the female self well, locating the female body as being primarily fecund, grounded in a material and cultural world as early feminist strategies suggest that women had no hand in making. Cyborgs, on the other hand, “are ether- quintessence”.

The cyborg does not seek a solitary identity: “one is too few, and two is only one possibility, intense pleasure in skill, machine skill, which ceases to be a sin, but an aspect of embodiment”.

It is this fluid and multiple identity that Haraway suggests we code, and code seems so apt a description. In the binary code world of zeros and ones, it is the relation between the two digits and the speed with which we travel between them that allows any complex meaning to be made, command to be issued, or function to be perceived. Zero and one, or high and low, as states unto themselves, mean little. It is also suggested that it is in the digital realm that gender falls away, and that this could potentially provide the ultimate liberation (a notion too complex to take issue with here).

Haraway states, “Communication technologies and biotechnologies are the crucial tools re-crafting our bodies.”, but this is how it has always been within western culture. The pictogram, the tapestry, the written word, the code of language itself: each of these early technologies for communication cast and recast our identities for dissemination. The medicalization of pregnancy has cemented our bodies with a primary function, one that requires mediation, too precious to be handled ourselves. It is in who constructs these technologies and their products that make the difference; and identity can become amplified as well as how these choices have been made. Tapestry, text, and binary code all share a provenance in textiles as the origin of communication technology, and the metaphor of weaving travels freely through the digital realm and the Internet (i.e. world wide web). We must not let it stop at metaphor, instead fully acknowledge the lessons to be learned from the myths of Arachne, a master weaver turned to spider by the goddess Athena, cursed to be more body than head, without signature, and to spin forever more; Penelope, who un-wove every night what she wove in the day so that she might determine her own destiny and affinities, and perhaps most importantly, Ariadne, who provided the thread that could lead one out of the labyrinth. The labyrinth structure has stood in for society and/or language in the long and multiple histories of western thought from Greco-Roman mythologies to Heidegger; that a thread could lead us out of such a complex yet unicursal structure suggests the need to revisit the traditionally feminine modes of textile production and acknowledge communication technology within them.

It is now 13 years since the publication of The Cyborg Manifesto, the information age is flourishing and those claiming cyborg status are many and oft published, though very few with the intentions outlined by Haraway. There seems to be a core difference between those that would seek self-definition in aligning themselves with a creature without origin and those that seek to father the creature, and bolster (I would say deny) their leaky bodies. The cyborg revolution has lead to a parallel arena known as wearable computing and its seeming sister discipline of electronic textiles. Practitioners are many and developments are fast. The union of zeros and ones with the matrix of warp and weft is a natural fit and an appropriate place to examine difference and to make material some of the affect of ether.

Here in Montréal at Hexagram, Institut de recherche et création en arts et technologies médiatiques http://www.hexagram.org/ there exists an axis of research called interactive textiles and wearable computing. The researchers at the institute are made up of artists/practitioners from the Université du Québec à Montréal, Université de Montréal, and Concordia University. In the Interactive Textiles Axe are most notably , Barbara Layne, Ingrid Bachman and Joey Berzowska, all affiliated with Concordia. Recently I had the opportunity to speak with artist/researcher and axe chair, Joey Berzowska.

_____________________________________________________________________

I predicated our discussion with the theme that had been suggested by dpi. for this issue, the Cyborg, in recognition of Donna Haraway’s germinal work, The Cyborg Manifesto, and an interest in re-visiting its tenets and measuring its effects in an increasingly active feminist/feminine presence in the digital arena. I suggested it might be a bit old school…

Joey: I made the joke just 5 minutes ago that I haven’t read Donna Haraway and the Cyborg Manifesto in the ten-ish years since it came out and the only thing that I remember distinctly from it is the idea of embodied knowledge and how at the time it was so interesting to me as a young feminist. Then when I ended up at MIT I really started working with what was called physical computation or tangible media. See glossary of terms

Basically, tangible media deals with both representing digital or virtual data in physical ways but also using various physical interfaces as a way to generate digital or virtual data other than just with a mouse and a keyboard. I started working in that field and wanted to work with the human body as a part of the whole equation of tangible media. Surprisingly the people that I was working with, most notably Hiroshi Ishii [http://web.media.mit.edu/~ishii/] – who is fantastic, has been a great mentor and a wonderful researcher – were really afraid of the body. He was really afraid of the notion of the body even though he had really pioneered this notion of tangible media. There is this joke that Bill Buxton [http://www.billbuxton.com/] tells in his lectures about the way that we conceptualise the computer. He says that if we ask somebody to draw a computer they will draw a screen and a mouse. They won’t actually draw the computer; they draw the interface. So if you ask the computer to draw the human, the computer will draw one eyeball and three fingers, the clicking finger, and two more for typing, cause it’s all that the computer perceives of us. Working in tangible media, I was really surprised that some of these tangible interfaces still use the same model of a human being, one eyeball – enough to see what is projected on surfaces or projected or constructed in the environment – and three fingers. So you touch something or push something or you roll something but really you’re just using the eyeball or the hand and not really using the rest of the body. A lot of researchers in the fields of tangible/ physical computing and also wearable computing, which we will talk about in a second, are male and are embracing this thing (cyborgian strategies) and they are really terrified of the body.

Jake: In our earlier conversations I have brought up the JG Ballard quote that seems to have brought forward this term second skins:

Fashion is the recognition that nature has endowed us with one skin too few, that a fully sentient being should wear its nervous system externally.

Ballard describes this as fashion but many people designing wearables use the term second skins and some people use it to describe the interface of a wearable computational device – the more expressive fashion type or even the Steve Mann style [http://wearcam.org/steve.html]. Often these are described as a hardened skin.

Joey: exoskeleton

Jake: Yeah, the defensible skin. It protects our skin. Even standard clothing defends our skin in a way, defends and displays.

Joey: Since you brought up Steve Mann, maybe I will just do a quick introduction to his work because he calls himself the world’s first cyborg, which is appropriate for this issue, and at the same time his research is in the field of wearable computing. This is one of those instances where the cyborg idea involves having the computational device as an integral part of your body.

Jake: I think the primary definition of cyborg was of an assisted body but it has come to mean integrated, so more like the stelarc [http://www.stelarc.va.com.au/] approach of a built-in ear actually altering the body.

Joey: Well, Steve Mann and I overlapped at the media lab for one year, which is when I started getting to know him. Most of his research involved wearable computing and he is of the school where they define wearables as literally wearing the computer on your body. He in fact talks about his wearable computing as a building built for one inhabitant, which is a very political thing and a very protective structure kind of thing. But my perspective on it, which is shared by a lot of other women who work in this field and are interested in the more expressive aspects of what we put on our bodies, is that these wearable technologies are not these exoskeletons or these buildings that protect us, but tools for communication and expression.(?)

Jake: It seems that there is a persistent return to very modernist ideals. For one, that there is a lack within the existing human body that we must remedy, or at least assist – in the wearable technologies of Steve Mann it is about heightening the sensorial ability of an existing body. Also that we must not only increase our sensorial ability through mechanical means, but that we must also create a more defensible space with that. The architectural model of how we wear things. A building for one body harkens to Le Corbusier’s idiom, “a machine for living”. A century later it’s like a mirror response that ultimately comes out to mean the same thing: the body is a limited creature that we must somehow assist, but not so much to display points of sharing. In some of the more expressive cases, it is not so much about information exchange as affect exchange. And defining space in a very different way. It is more about self presentation as presentation, much more complex, and I would say mutable rather than fortress building. These notions of mutability are in fact where there is a real line down feminine or feminist practices that relate back to many early feminist writings about the fluid self and acknowledge our changeable way.

Joey: That’s interesting because one of the things I focus on with my work is this notion of playfulness, which is something that I never thought of in the terms that you have just laid out, but I think it is an interesting extension of that. I talk a lot about the outfits I make as intimate and playful technologies, which is something Ann Galloway talks a lot about when discussing mobile technologies, ways of creating a space for intimacy and playfulness. Ideas that don’t often come up in the more utilitarian-focused work.

Jake: Definitely not. But there has been a lot of heady analysis of the term play , even in Anne Galloway’s blog (a must read http://www.purselipsquarejaw.org/http://www.purselipsquarejaw.org/research_design/notes/play.html " target="blank"> http://www.purselipsquarejaw.org/research_design/notes/play.html ). Her interest in the user is a way of promoting access to technology for those who may have been intimidated by it. One of the things that is most interesting to me is that these women producing this kind of media are themselves theorising that the academic division (between practitioner/maker and theoriser/writer) doesn’t really exist in this milieu as of yet. For example, Ann Galloway (doctoral candidate, author, etc), her interest is in the user; her job is to be a sponge and absorb all this information and make it shareable. On her site she suggests there is nothing playful about play. It is, like much interactive media, directorial: you do this = that will happen. I guess this is more in the realm of games rather than pure play, as in, there must be a result; there is a winner, there must be a loser. But it gets very interesting because in the kind of play we are describing here, there are some very fixed circumstances like when you start thinking about the users, what they will do with it. In your work, one of the things that really interests me is your ability to re-purpose technologies, things that have been developed for one purpose but then bringing them into this arena of play and affect.

Joey: It’s definitely true of all of the yarns and threads that I use. One of the things I try to do with my work – and this is almost just to prove that you can do it because in truth there are so many technical considerations that it is probably not the best solution – is to get away as much as possible from wires and hard components, to use conductive yarns and threads and integrate them into textiles with weaving and embroidery and sewing and quilting, etcetera, to create soft circuit boards. I used to call it soft computation but I just came up with a new term a few weeks ago, because a lot of people talk about softwear but they spell ware W-E-A-R. In fact one of the courses I teach is called second skins and softwear but I didn’t come up with that name, I wouldn’t necessarily use those terms. I kept thinking soft wear, that’s not really the right way to talk about it because it’s not really about software … anyway, I started thinking about it as soft hardware, shardware, or shware. Tee hee. So now I work on shware, but a lot of that work is predicated on whether you have the appropriate kind of yarns, spun or continuous twisted sort of things; whether they integrate conductive materials at the fibre level or if it is like a nylon thread that has two stainless steel filament wrapped around it. There are many different materials developed not necessarily for military, but definitely for aerospace, especially the Dupont stuff, which is used for electro-magnetic shielding in outer space. I actually don’t fully understand it:

Jake: I have to admit I am glad to hear that!

Joey: I know bad things happen up there!! (much laughter)

Jake: Bad things happen here too, they are starting to spec some of these materials for earth home use as well!

Joey: I know. Actually, the Bekintex [http://www.bekintex.com/yarns " target="blank"> http://www.bekintex.com/yarns ] yarns that I use are mostly developed for industry and to create surfaces which protect against EMF (electro magnetic fields) on this planet, but also for factories where they deal with sensitive equipment which incorporate these conductive fibres into carpets and so on. So a lot of those yarns I am now using to weave, sew or embroider, to make touch sensors or capacitive sensors on clothing, are traditionally used for industrial and aerospace, if not military, purposes.

Jake: Well I guess the big military project, or at least the one made most public, was the smart shirt.

Joey: The Georgia tech one.
[http://www.gatech.edu/news-room/archive/news_releases/sensatex.html " target="blank"> http://www.gatech.edu/news-room/archive/news_releases/sensatex.html ]

Jake: Yeah and now the ability to camouflage with projection

Joey: the dynamic camouflage.

Well, the original research around the Georgia tech motherboard, was for triage out in the field, in the sense of . discontinuity. The shirt is woven with many optical fibres which are very good sensors for continuity. So a bullet hole is picked up as a discontinuity. If you put light on one end (of the fibre) and it doesn’t come out the other, that is a discontinuity right there. According to the stories I’ve read, the shirt knows where you are wounded and if it is a very large discontinuity, it’s triage in the sense it will say: don’t bother sending the rescue team, it’s too late. They’ve been trying to market it for almost three years. They have a front, but I’m not sure they have a product and are selling anything as of yet. It is being marketed as a fitness/sports sort of thing, as well as something for children and the elderly which is everybody’s favourite user group when it comes to surveillance technologies. Which is like saying the elderly and children don’t have the same rights to privacy as we do. That is how they justify a lot of this research, which is of course funded by the military, like having a GPS in everything we own. And a lot of people accept it, even a lot of artists, which just blows me away. Artists working with the tracking of everybody because it is so cool, you can map out the social groups. It’s such bullshit you know, and it all just comes from an acceptance that tracking each other is cool because these are the technologies that are given to us, these are the technologies that are being funded. Anyways children and the elderly are not considered to have the same rights as us middle aged people.

Jake: Well, we are the purchasing demographic that will be responsible for tracking our youths or elders. Because we have the money to spend on them and are probably determining what moneys they get to spend.

Joey: It is just so interesting that the assumption is that the elderly or those who are sick would want to stay at home longer even of that means surrendering all their privacy, rather than going into a nursing home and it’s the same with children. The proliferation of surveillance technologies is all justified by fear, this bizarre culture of.

Jake: These technologies are still based on the ideals of a perfect body, and a perfect body being of a certain level of ability and function – excluding that which is perceived as a flawed body as just a different thing. It seems much of this technology completely denies difference. Some of this technology seeks to make equal a very utopian notion of what equal would be. The more intriguing work acknowledges difference in a very unusual way and suggests that perhaps we don’t have to arrive at the same abilities, but that we all need access to potential information. These tracking technologies are very much part of that. We buy into them because most often they prey on the pretence of caring. Just as the paternal notion of big brother was supposed to be the right thing for the masses, us being able to watch our children at all times or know where mom with Alzheimer’s is at all times, is supposed to be taken on because this is how we are able to care for these people, but it precludes notions of simple contact. Actually being there.

Joey: I believe that a lot of the assumptions for ubiquitous computing, (ubi-comp research), are similarly problematic and by making your environment “smarter” (in huge quotes) we are taking away a lot of actual presence and forms of communication.

Jake: Such as full body perception, which is not one prescriptive sensor reading one form of data, one individual eye. Things remain quite ocular-centric with that kind of surveillance technology, perceiving the other as an image on screen. Like now, we may primarily be engaged aurally, but so many other factors alter my perception of this experience.

Joey. It’s also interesting what you said about the perfect body because I met this research scientist named Gregor Wolbring last year. He was born to a mother that took thalidomide, so his body is very different form what is accepted as the normal, but he is incredibly self sufficient and is a bio chemist at the university of Calgary and an advisor on bio-ethics issues to the Council of Canadians with Disabilities. He shows up at a lot of conferences that Sarah Diamond
[http://www.codezebra.net/] organises at the Banff Centre [http://www.banffcentre.ca/bnmi/] to bring up the notion that we don’t all have the same body and we shouldn’t all be designing for that body. For example, he doesn’t have legs, so he meets a lot of people who want to design him legs

Jake: and he may not desire legs.

Joey: Right. Actually, he meets with people that want to make him legs, and first of all he doesn’t want legs, he just wants a better wheel chair. So they make conscious design decisions to limit the abilities of the legs, to make them just like me to make sure to give this person legs, but not to make them too fast or too strong, because that’s not normal. So even though the scientific possibility is there to make him a super man, they won’t do that because of these bizarre ideas and notions of the normal body, or what you called the ideal body, but not too good, because then it would be abnormal.

(…)

Joey: One of the things we teach in our program at Concordia, computation arts, is to work with the tools at the lowest possible level in order to actually create your own tools and be able to create new sorts of content, or environments. And I wonder, as programming environments are becoming more accessible, even through scripting languages and integrated kits are actually fairly simple to use once you’ve grown up in this culture of technology. Theses things will become either customisable or modular and a lot more people will be creating their own kinds of devices and this might take things in different directions. Again the danger is in how easily we accept components or modules like GPS tracking or wireless communication: how easily we accept the idea that yes it would be wonderful if all objects could communicate with one another wirelessly, even though there really isn’t any clear reason for that, and if you look into it deeper it’s again very much based on this culture of surveillance but it’s so seductive and I don’t know why that is.

Jake: As with all new technologies from 1600AD on – I mean, we do tend to think of this as such a contemporary set of circumstances. I’ve been lately interested in Marconi, for example. He started developing these communication technologies because he didn’t feel comfortable around other people. He didn’t like to be around other bodies. He preferred to be alone. If he could find a way to mediate his contact, he preferred that. Now that these technologies are being taught in art schools, not tech schools but art schools, it’s interesting how the hybridisation of education is allowing the same information to be taught with such different intent. New technologies always hold both a threat and a promise when one describes the notion of the potential for communication and that things could be communicating at all times, this sounds like, “isn’t that a remarkable opportunity”, but I always feel I have to ask some old school Marxist questions: who benefits? Who pays? Who’s talking? Who is listening? And, does anybody really have that much to say?…

You are teaching at Concordia in the now called Computational Arts program, but you have an unusual academic history. You got your BFA and a Math degree at the same time and then made the decision to pursue the technological or the more logical end of it, which at this point and time could happen in art school.

Joey: Although you know why? MFA's are expensive you know. The Media Lab at MIT [http://www.media.mit.edu/] is the only school that I applied to for grad school and the only reason why I chose that one is because if you get accepted you automatically get a full scholarship and living expenses, so I actually had a salary of 1500 USD a month and all my tuition paid for, so I was actually just being cheap!

Jake: The difference between that and art school is pretty remarkable. I mean you could feel safe, this kind of security can allow one to become pretty creative, perhaps become a better scientist and probably a better citizen (artist poverty is so over-rated)

Joey: When I first got there I was working with software, writing my own software for graphics and then started talking with Hiroshi Ishii. When he saw my graphics, he really loved it but he was asking “why are you still using a mouse, you could be using these beautiful, squeezable interfaces”. That’s what got me interested in physical media. I was interested in the body and he wasn’t, I was interested in soft things, he wasn’t, so I ended up leaving and started up a company with Maggie Ort, (IFM), http://www.ifmachines.com/. But even that was not quite the best place for me to pursue a lot of ideas that I had. Now being at Concordia, in academia, and able to get considerable research money, I am able to do considerably wacky things.

I have two levels to my research, one is very much the fundamental research in trying to construct these soft electronic textile-based substrates for communication and mostly for displays. I definitely come from this traditionally female, feminine (?) point of view where clothing is about expression, that electronic textiles will enable this kind of dynamic clothing, interactive clothes, reactive clothes, and that the killer app (to talk in tech terms) is really personal expression and changing identity; that kind of definition of the second skin. (?) Coming from that point of view, a lot of my research deals not only with these particular substrates but also those that will enable or be used as display surfaces to enter this arena of reactive garments. I also made a decision a while ago, to try to stay away from emissive technology, things that light up like LEDs and so on, because I’m not really that interested in performance. I’m more interested in the kinds of things, fabrics you can wear during the day, so really colour change or shape change. With my research assistants, in particular Christine Keller, we do a lot of work in developing different ways of weaving or embroidering or sewing together these other yarns or threads or fabrics that conduct in different ways and at different levels, to build simple soft circuit boards but also things that can address a display surface. So that’s part one of my research

Part 2, okay, if you have that then what kinds of applications make sense? What kinds of garments are meaningful or fun or interesting? That is more what I think of as my art practice. These days I’m especially interested in ideas of memory and (to again take a tech term) “history of use”. A lot of people talk about history of use and how it first became relevant with the web, like with hit counters. In the physical world things become worn and you see how many people have stepped there and it’s dirty. In the digital world that can’t really happen, so different methods have come up to indicate history of use on digital objects. Now that we have physical objects that are digitally enhanced, what kind of memories do those objects have and how can you indicate their histories, their physical histories? And with a digital layer on top, how can we manipulate those histories in order to both reveal, hide, augment what you want to say, what you want to reveal, not only about what you are now, but also about your history. The simplest examples of that are dresses that remember how you have been touched, or where you have been touched, and even dresses that have thermographic spots.

For example, a skirt that remembers when it’s been groped so it remembers what I call "intimacy events". A lot of it is kind of funny conceptual work. Part of it actually aims to reveal what’s usually invisible – that is that wearable technology actually can remember personal things and can then display things publicly. Like, when you have a cell phone and you’re told that every call can be tracked and is stored in a database and that maybe someone can have access to, that you don’t see it visually so you’re like, whatever, who cares, but when you see a skirt that displays when you have been groped, suddenly it takes on a whole different meaning. "Wait, theses technologies can actually remember what I have done and communicate that to other people." So that’s part of it, just to visually illustrate those ideas of surveillance and loss of privacy. It’s incredible what a difference it makes. If I talk about potentially invasive techniques of biometric sensing : like if your doctor has access to that data, your insurance will also have access to it and potentially deny you coverage, and people in the audience are like, well, whatever, just don’t get sick. But suddenly I show them this dress and if you squeeze it or grope it, that information can be shown to your lover later on and suddenly everyone starts taking it seriously. It’s fascinating, just by having little lights that flash when you have been groped, suddenly people’s perception of that (surveillance technologies/history of use) change.

Another big motivation is this idea of embodied knowledge and this idea of intimacy as an embodied thing. Steve Mann talks about intimacy as well, and one of the examples that he gives is taking his eye-tap device into somebody else and somebody else plugging their eye-tap into him. Being able to see the world through the other person eye-tap device even for just a moment :" usually they only see themselves really " and that is a definition of intimacy. It is very disembodied, very mediated. A lot of wearable and portable technologies enable this greater intimacy, this possibility of communication, but not physical. It enables us to evolve as a society in many different ways. It enables us to keep in touch with people we wouldn't keep in touch in with, except there is no touch involved. So a lot of these dresses I’m working on also deal with ideas of technology that change social patterns towards the more physical. For example at Banff this summer, Sarah Diamond organised this fashion show, (inside/outside http://www.horizonzero.ca/flashsite/issue16/issue16.html?lang=en&section=intro16 ) and we had dancers that performed in different kinds of costumes (from the electronic textiles and wearable computing fields). I had made the “Touch Dress Series”. I have the ones I call the feathery dresses, that have LEDs and touch pads, and the ones I call the spotty dresses which have thermographic spots. There are three of each, which was really important, because very often these wearable things are shown as one, shown in a gallery as one thing so you don't really interact with it, you kind of push it and well. If you have two people each wearing one, they kind of touch each other, but you can’t really start thinking about social patterns yet, but once you have three you really start seeing a social development. How is it going to work once we have more people wearing these strange things? The feathery dresses have touch sensors, basically just switches made out of metallic organza: one just above the breast, one on the front hip, and one on the back hip, and there were three dancers wearing them and touching each other and touching themselves. They were at first very shy, because they weren’t really used to touching each other, but as the day went on they really developed this wonderful choreography of physical intimacy and touch. Same with the spotty dresses where you actually have to rub each other, or rub yourself or lean against each other to make the spots disappear. Very interesting, physical intimacy and touch

So that’s how I am trying to bring the body back into wearable technology.

..
listen to a radio interview with Joey on the XX-Files :
/demo/images/intCKUT_joey.mp3
..

Joanna Berzowska is an Assistant Professor of Design Art and Digital Image/Sound at Concordia University in Montreal. Her work and research deal primarily with “soft computation”: electronic textiles, responsive clothing as wearable technology, reactive materials and squishy interfaces. She is the founder of XS design studio in Montreal. She is also founder and senior design advisor of International Fashion Machines in Boston, where she developed the first electronic ink wearable animated display and Electric Plaid, an addressable colour-change textile. She received her Masters of Science from MIT for her work titled Computational Expressionism. She worked with the Tangible Media Group of the MIT Media Lab on research projects such as the Music Bottles. She directed Interface Design at the Institute for Interactive Media at the University of Technology in Sydney. She holds a BA in Pure Mathematics and a BFA in Design Arts. Her art and design work has been shown in the Cooper-Hewitt Design Museum in NYC, SIGGRAPH, Art Directors Club in NYC, Australian Museum in Sydney, NTT ICC in Tokyo and Ars Electronica Center in Linz, among others. She has lectured on the intersections of art, design, technology and computation at SIGGRAPH, Banff New Media Institute in Canada and Interaction Design Institute Ivrea in Italy, among others.
http://www.berzowska.com

Introduction bibliography/works sited:
Donna Haraway, “A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century,” in Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (New York; Routledge, 1991), pp.149-181. Respectively p153, 180 and 164.

A Glossary of Terms:
Taken from email interview of Joey by Nina Czegledy: ISEA Newsletter
THE INTER-SOCIETY FOR THE ELECTRONIC ARTS
ISEA NEWSLETTER #96
ISSN 1488-3635 #96, March – April 2004
http://www.isea-web.org/eng/inl/inl96.html

Definitions: Joey Berzowska

Tangible Media is a term coined by Hiroshi Ishii of the MIT Media Lab to describe tangible user interfaces which employ physical objects, surfaces, and spaces as tangible embodiments of digital information. These include foreground interactions with graspable objects and augmented surfaces, exploiting the human senses of touch and kinesthesia. They also include the idea of background information displays that use “ambient media” (light, sound, airflow, and water movement) to communicate digitally mediated information at the periphery of human awareness.

Smart Materials (such as “smart fabrics”) can be thought of as materials that replace machines and have the potential to simplify engineering considerably. They integrate the functionality of various separate parts into a single material. This is mechanically efficient because it eliminates the need for parts to be physically interconnected.

Electronic textile (sometimes called “smart fabrics” or “wearables”) refers to a textile substrate that integrates capabilities for sensing (biometric or environmental), wireless communication, power transmission and interconnection technology, to allow sensors or things such as information processing devices to be networked together within a fabric. The substrate for an electronic textile (the textile “circuit board”) is often constructed from various conductive yarns instead of wires.

Soft Computing is a term that I use to describe the use of conductive yarns and fabrics, active materials and flexible sensors to allow the construction of electronic circuits on soft substrates. It implies a move away from traditional electronics and the exploration of emergent materials that can enable physical computation for the body and personal spaces.

I also include this definition form Roz Picard’s research group.
Affective Computing is computing that relates to, arises from, or deliberately influences emotions http://affect.media.mit.edu/
Our research is aimed at giving machines the skills of emotional intelligence, including the ability to recognize, model, and understand human emotion, to appropriately communicate emotion, and to respond to it effectively. We are also interested in developing technologies to assist in the development of human emotional intelligence.

Our approach, grounded in findings from cognitive science, psychology, neuroscience, medicine, psychophysiology, sociology, and ethics, is to develop engineering tools for measuring, modeling, reasoning, and responding to affect. Thus, we are developing new sensors, algorithms, systems, and theories that enable new forms of machine intelligence as well as new forms of human understanding.