Ekşi Duyuru

aşağıdaki yazıyı azar azar çevirmeye çalışacağım, bana yardım etmek isteyen kimseler anlayabildikleri kısmı çevirebilirse çok mesud olurum.

uzun olduğunu biliyorum, o yüzden başka şansım kalmadı. herkes bir ucundan tutsa diyorum ben çevirdiklerimi ekleyeceğim.


However, the cyborg is different in that it is a hybrid of the "only
machine" and human since it is modeled on human abilities and intelligences.
It is the machine that replicates us, causing what Katherine Hayles
(1999) describes as, "terror and exciting pleasures" (p. 285).
This reverberation between pleasure and terror can be easily established
if we consider, once again, the seemingly benign medical devices mentioned
above. Within a medicalized discourse these prosthetics are seen as
necessary, and even kind, in the face of illness. Using them seeks to
restore human potential. We have a much different reaction if we consider
implanting or attaching such devices to a "healthy" physical body.
In the healthy body such prosthetics become the marker of abjection, the
non-human. This difference in the value that we assign to such devices is
of critical importance for it renders the cyborg body as harmless when its
purpose is to restore the semblance of lost humanity, but as monstrous
when the body is healthy. This construction of the normal/natural body
locates the cyborg as terror and establishes for us the fear we have of the
non-human, when the non-human is not delimited by the restrictions
that the rest of us operate under. Performance artists such as those that we
discuss here use technology to create a cyber body/identity that challenges
the stereotypes associated with abjection.
This oscillation between terror and pleasure can also be seen in
Haraway's work. She writes that the, "cyborg world is about the final
imposition of a grid of control on the planet, about the final abstraction
embodied in a Star Wars apocalypse waged in the name of defense...
From another perspective, a cyborg world might be about lived social and
bodily realities in which people are not afraid of the joint kinship with
animals and machines, not afraid of permanently partial identities and
contradictory standpoints"(1991, p. 154). As Haraway indicates, the
myth of the cyborg blurs several of the intermediary boundaries between
the human and the non-human. The first of these leakages occurs as we
make indistinct the boundaries between human and animal. The second
shift takes place when the differentiations between human/animal and
machine are considered. The third, which Haraway positions as an outgrowth
of the second, consists of the imprecise nature of the boundary
between the physical and the non-physical. The blurring of these boundaries
allows for Haraway's declaration, "so my cyborg myth is about transgressed
boundaries, potent fusions, and dangerous possibilities which
progressive people might explore as one part of needed political work"
(Haraway, 1991, p. 154).
Hayles has noted that Haraway's identification of the figure of the
cyborg locates a space in which traditional boundaries between human
and machine are blurred and leakages occur in both directions. Haraway's
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Cyborg Pedagogy
argument is even more compelling in that she recognizes that, "cyborgs
are simultaneously entities and metaphors, living being and narrative constructions"
(Hayles, 114). In other words, there is both a materiality, an
embodied presence to the myth of the cyborg, and a metaphorical space
that is created by the narratives that produce the myth. In this sense, the
metaphor of the cyborg creates a conceptual space for performing embodied
subjectivity (Haraway, 1991; Hayles, 1999). Performance art enables
us to use the cyborg metaphor to create personal narratives of identity as
both a strategy of resistance and as a means through which to construct
new ideas, images, and myths about ourselves living in a technological
world. In doing so, the performance of the self as cyborg represents an
overt political act of resistance in the digital age.
Unlike Haraway and Hayles, who struggle to define a posthuman
politics of resistance, other apocalyptic prophets of the digital age are
foretelling the future possibility of downloading human consciousness
into a computer. The idea that the mind and therefore identity represent
disembodied forms of information discounts the corporeal presence of the
body and renders it obsolete. The cyborg myth represents a new paradigm
in the history of embodiment. Whereas prevailing Western European
ontology defines the body's presence as the awareness of its own corporeal
existence, its absence is conceived as the receding of the body, a process of
abandonment while being absorbed in the world outside of itself.
Merleau-Ponty argues against this mind/body split when he claims that
presence and absence are intertwined through enfleshment, a process
where the world is perceived in the body as flesh.
Allucquere Rosanne Stone (1996) writes that, "the physical/virtual distinction
is not a mind/body distinction. The concept of the mind is not
part of virtual systems theory, and the virtual component of the socially
apprehensible citizen is not a disembodied thinking thing, but rather a
different way of conceptualizing a relationship to the human body"(p. 40).
For Stone, the body is mediated through discourse from a variety of texts,
producing a legible body that is separate from the physical body to which
it is attached. However, as she goes on to explain, the legible body is
connected to a specific physical body, and this fusion forms the socially
apprehensible citizen. This separates the mind and body in very different
ways than that typically presented through the Cartesian dualism. Instead
of presenting the mind at the expense of the body, we are confronted with
the differing legibilities of the mind and the body, but we do not attempt
to escape their coexistence in order to produce a comprehensible being.
This inversion of the Cartesian dichotomy presents the possibility that
inscription and embodiment are also interconnected. If we consider
inscription as the world's imposition on the body, then embodiment
represents the assimilation of inscription. In defending the functionality
of the body under the circumstances of information technology, Hayles
Studies in Art Education 337
Charles R. Garoian and Yvonne M. Gaudelius
(1999) distinguishes between inscription and embodiment: "Incorporating
practices [embodiment] perform the bodily content; inscribing practices
correct and modulate the performance" (p. 200). She clearly differentiates
between, yet interconnects the body's performance of cultural incorporation
and the culture's performance of inscription. She states, "culture not
only flows from the [cultural] environment into the body but also
emanates from the body into the [cultural] environment. The body produces
culture at the same time that culture produces the body" (p. 200).
With the body and the culture interconnected in this reflexive loop, the
cyborg no longer signifies a disembodied ontology, but embodiment that
is in a continual state of liminality, contingency, and ephemerality, what
critical theorist Peter Lunenfeld (1999) refers to as an "unfinished"
aesthetic (p. 7). Hayles distinction between the performativity of the body
and that of the culture enables us to theorize a pedagogy of resistance. As
she exposes and examines these differences, she opens a space of possibility
where embodiment, although tied to inscription, can determine its own
fate, to produce its own cultural identity.
Hayles's concept of cybernetic signification serves as a compelling
metaphor for a critical pedagogy. Compared with Lacan's concept of a
"floating signifier," where identity is contingent upon the presence and
absence of the actual body, Hayles characterizes the body's absorption in
virtual culture as a "flickering signifier." She argues that, "information
technologies... fundamentally alter the relation of signified to signifier.
Carrying the instabilities implicit in Lacanian floating signifiers one step
further, information technologies create... flickering signifiers, characterized
by their tendency toward unexpected metamorphosis, attenuations,
and dispersions" (p. 30). The actual body's presence and absence transformed
as "pattern and randomness" signify Hayles's concept of the "virtual
body." Flickering between the randomness of digital information and its
patterning, the body's identity is continually negotiated and re-negotiated,
a play of resistance between the disjunctive attributes of cyberspace
and the conjunctions that occur as the subject coalesces meaning and
interpretation.
Hayles's flickering signifier corresponds to Deleuze and Guattari's
(1987) random ontological system of the rhizome and its patterning as
nomadology. A rhizome consists of a reticulated system in which an infinite
number of connections are possible. Unlike binary systems that are
limited to dualistic configurations, those of the rhizome are multicentric.
Like an assemblage, it provides multiple lines of flight from one conceptual
plateau to another to the point that, "a rhizome or multiplicity never
allows itself to be overcoded" (p. 9). Another characteristic of the rhizome
is "asignifying rupture," its ability to disconnect in one location within
the system, yet reconvene through the other of its multiple routes of connectivity.
Thus, the rhizome functions as a mapping system that provides
multiple trajectories that are continually drawn and redrawn as its terrain
338 Studies in Art Education
Cyborg Pedagogy
is being negotiated. Movement through these trajectories constitutes
nomadology, a process whereby the multicentric system of the rhizome
yields an ephemeral pattern, one that must be continually renegotiated.
"With the nomad... it is deterritorialization that constitutes the relation
to the earth, to such a degree that the nomad reterritorializes on deterritorialization
itself' (Deleuze & Guattari, p. 381). Like the nomad, the
cyborg travels through multiple metaphorical spaces as it negotiates
meaning between embodied and inscribed subjectivities. As noted earlier,
these metaphorical spaces encourage movements of transgression across
fluid boundaries within which performance artists can find the potential
to enact the cyborg as an art of political resistance.