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ctheory@lists.uvic.ca> Date: February 4, 2004 3:57:37 PM EST
> To:
ctheory@lists.uvic.ca> Subject: [CTHEORY] Article 137 - The Cyborg Mother: A Breached Boundary
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> _____________________________________________________________________
> CTHEORY THEORY, TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE VOL 27, NOS 1-2
> *** Visit CTHEORY Online:
http://www.ctheory.net ***
>
> Article 137 04/02/04 Editors: Arthur and Marilouise Kroker
> _____________________________________________________________________
>
>
>
> The Cyborg Mother: A Breached Boundary
> =========================
==========================
=========
>
>
> ~Jaimie Smith-Windsor~
>
>
>
> Why not tell a story in a new way? Why not think in unfinished ways?
> Without fixity? Without finality? Ask questions without answers.
> Without presuppositions and causes and effects and linear time. Why
> not. Why not "whisk yourself away from your comfortable
> position?"[1] When we live in a world of fractured identities and
> broken boundaries, why not rebel against yourself, or the
> technologies of "yourself" and discover new ways of being? Reconcile
> that everything is being shattered. Identity is being shattered and
> technology is picking up the pieces, and there stands before us an
> infinitude of recombinant possibility. Rewriting history becomes
> possible:
>
> The time of history passes through the stories of individuals:
> their birth, their experience...[2]
>
>
> The birth of my daughter:
> -------------------------
>
> Aleah Quinn Smith-Windsor
>
> born: January 31st, 2003
>
>
> A few days after Quinn was born, this quote appeared, written beside
> her incubator:
>
> Every blade of grass has an angel that bends over it and
> whispers, grow, grow. Anon.
>
> It was a near-fatal birth. Quinn was born at twenty-four and a half
> weeks gestation, three and a half months before her due date. Her
> birth weight was 700 grams, about one pound and a half.
>
> February 1, 2003 -- It is difficult to imagine such a tiny,
> perfect human being. Her feet are no larger than two
> fingernails. Her legs are about the same size as adult fingers,
> femurs measuring 4.5 centimeters. Her eyebrows curve like
> fallen eyelashes above her eyes, waiting to be wished upon.
>
>
> Morphology after the birth of my daughter:
> ------------------------------------------
>
> Immediately after Quinn's lungs were cleared she was incubated,
> stabilized and flown, with the Neonate Team, by way of helicopter
> ambulance, to the Special Care Nursery at the British Columbia
> Children's Hospital in Vancouver. We got to see her for a minute,
> tangled beneath the cords of her life support machines.
>
> February 2, 2003 -- A pump pushes breast milk down her throat,
> through a tube that goes into her belly. Sixty-five breaths per
> minute are administered by a Drager 2000 Ventilator. She
> receives extra nutrition through an artificial umbilical line,
> blood-products and medications through an Intra Venous.
> Electrodes cover her body, measure her breaths and heart beats,
> her temperature, oxygen saturation and blood pressure.
>
>
> Motherhood -- a Breached Boundary:
> ----------------------------------
>
> My daughter's birth was a post-human, cyborg moment. She became
> cyborg, "the illegitimate child of the twentieth-century
> technological dynamo -- part human, part machine, never completely
> either."[3] Using this moment to grapple with the concept and
> implications of cyborg culture reveals some important questions about
> the amalgamation between the technological and the biological, and
> "not just in the banal meat-meets-metal sense."[4] Breaching the
> bio-techno boundary forces an engagement with "new and complex
> understandings of 'life', consciousness, and the distinction (or lack
> of distinction) between the biological and the technological."[5]
> Becoming cyborg is about the simultaneous externalization of the
> nervous system and internalization of the machine. Thus symbiosis of
> human and machine makes possible the genesis of the cyborg
> consciousness. Ultimately, the breached boundary of the human body
> is a diasporatic phenomenon: the dispersion of an originally
> homogeneous entity (the body), "the diasporas of the human condition
> into several mutually incomprehensible languages."[6]
>
> Becoming cyborg is a consciousness that is embedded within the notion
> of diasporas. To confront the interface between human and machine is
> to confront cyborg consciousness. The interface is the matriarch of
> cyborg culture, assuming, "a unified role: a means of communication
> and reproduction; carrier and weaver; machine assemblage in the
> service of the species; a general purpose system of simulation."[7]
> Technology displaces motherhood, with "her inexhaustible aptitude for
> mimicry" which makes her "the living foundation for the whole staging
> of the world". Being cyborg means that infancy without motherhood is
> possible. Before the displacement of motherhood by technology can
> be imagined, however, it is first necessary to explore the
> relationship between mother and child. Within the dual
> relationship transference between mother and child, according to
> Julia Kristeva, it is possible "to posit as "object" of analysis, not
> "childhood language", but rather an infantile language."[8] Before
> literate language begins to encode the identity of the infant, and
> prior to the moment where the mirror introduces the paradoxical
> representation of reality, the infant and the mother exist within a
> symbiotic relationship defined by two basic principles: the need to
> nurture and the nurture of need. The mother-child symbiosis provides
> the necessary relationship for infantile language to be communicated.
> The infant is incapable of distinguishing between "sameness" and
> "otherness", between "subject" and "object", between itself and the
> mother.[9] The infantile language means that infants are not
> capable of imagining themselves autonomous of the Mother. But what
> if this symbiotic relationship between mother and child were
> interrupted? What happens when technology begins to work itself into
> the infantile discourse, severing the symbiosis between mother and
> child? What happens when the infant, instead becomes incapable of
> distinguishing between itself and the machine? These are the
> questions posed by the biological mother of a cyborg. This is the
> genesis of a cyborg. It begins in pre-literacy, when the child
> engages in an infantile language with the machine, and not, the
> mother.
>
> According to Julia Kristeva, "love replaces narcissism in a third
> person that is external to the act of discursive communication."[10]
> Love between humans, thus, becomes invested in a third party. What
> happens then, in cyborg culture, when that "third party" is not a
> person at all, but a machine -- a ventilator, an incubator, a
> monitor. Technology separates the dialectic relationship between
> mother and child, mediating the relations between them. In the
> production of artificial means to life, is the machine capable of
> simulating love? Is the cyborg capable of love? Or is it merely
> consuming?
>
> March 30, 2003 -- Quinn has been fighting with her ventilator.
> She's tries to tug it out of her throat, but it's glued to her
> skin. To stop her from wrestling, the doctor drugged her with
> addictive sedatives and paralyzed her so she can't move, so the
> ventilator can fully take over her body. How can such violence
> give life? So, I read her a story by Dr. Seuss about really
> small people called Whos... At the sound of my voice, she
> opened her eyes for a minute. That's not supposed to happen. I
> was asked to leave. I was disrupting the machine.
>
> Living within a mediated body means that rituals of being are also
> written by technology. Technology is mimesis, the capability of
> imitating the human condition with such exactitude that it has become
> synonymous with the skin, the flesh, the vital organs of human
> bodies. Artificial life becomes the performance of real life.
> Distinguishing between skin from machine, thus becomes difficult.
>
> February 8, 2003 -- There is a scab on her chest where the
> nurse pulled the electrode off her skin, and with it, came most
> of the right nipple.
>
> What are the implications of this violent symbiosis? Becoming cyborg
> implicates the human condition with the eternal mediation of the
> human experience, the eternal return of the machine. The human
> condition becomes the media itself. The cyborg consciousness
> becomes, like the clear glass of the incubator, an invisible
> interface through which everything is mediated -- the environment,
> the experience of living, the means to communicate, the way of
> "knowing." The relationship between mother and child itself is
> mediated by technology. Technology interrupts the relation,
> intercepts the exchange of nurturing and needing of the infantile
> language. The Mother becomes redundant: technology becomes the
> external womb.
>
> Within the discourse of cyber-feminism, the externalized,
> technological womb begins to make sense: "in Latin, it is matrix, or
> matter, both the mother and the material."[11] Technology has become
> both the mother and the matter of the consciousness, the medium
> through which the need to nurture and the nurture of need are
> fulfilled. The cyborg is thus born through this virtual non-space,
> this womb of machinic consciousness. Within the technological womb,
> human bodies and human consciousness becomes "cy-dough-plasma" --
> malleable matter, without fixed form.[12]
>
> February 27, 2003 -- ...I'm a little confused about her ears.
> They're pliable. Lacking cartilage at this stage of development
> often finds them in crumples of folded-over flesh. They require
> frequent re-positioning and remolding so they don't get all
> folded up like fortune cookies. I try not to play with them too
> much...but, it's not like you can rationalize with her yet...
> "don't crumple up your ears dear...".
>
> Externalizing the womb subjects the unformed body to manipulation.
> The consciousness, like the fetal body, becomes the art of the
> machine. Bodies and consciousness are remixed. What we perceive to
> be the body often becomes distorted in the engineering of cyborg.
>
> February 3, 2003 -- It was as if her delicate features had been
> rearranged to make room for equipment. Somehow, her perfect
> nose was in the way of the Ventilator, so they moved it off to
> the side. The machines rearrange the perfection of her body.
>
> Just as in Julia Kristeva's infantile language, there is no easy way
> to distinguish between the child and the simulated techno-Mother.
> The machine and the baby become symbiotic. "Sameness" governs the
> relationship between the baby and the machine. Their sameness means
> that they're mutually dependent on each other in order for life to
> continue.
>
> Technology is capable of simulating vital signs, of supporting life,
> of becoming Mother. The child of the techno-Mother is essentially, a
> virtual body. A simulation of vital signs that becomes internalized.
> The ventilator simulates Quinn's breathing, supporting her life
> through mimicry. Through the perfect simulation of breathing, the
> ritual of life goes forward. In cyborg culture, the lines between
> simulation and reality are blurred into irrelevancy. The cyborg is
> the interface between simulation and reality, where the simulacra
> becomes capable of living. Her body, "redesigned by means of
> life-support machines and prosthetic organs."[13]
>
> Thus, infancy has become disembodied from the biological Mother and
> goes forward unmanned, like the Predator Drone