主任张育仁被判15年徒刑
"I'm creeping back to life My nervous system all awry I'm wearing the inside out" Wearing the Inside Out, Pink Floyd lyrics: Anthony MooreSome people might react with puzzlement to the statement: "we're all cyborgs". When most people encounter the term cyborg, they probably imagine something like a Terminator like being, or some such, or even a robot maybe. A cyborg isn't a robot, though. The most simple definition of a cyborg is a human-machine hybrid. The term cyborg (short for cybernetic organism) wasn't invented by Norbert Wiener, though it is very much of product of, and very much implied by, his thinking. The term was coined in 1960, by two scientists pondering the adaptability of man to space travel:
"What are some of the devices necessary for creating self-regulating
man-machine systems? The self-regulation needs to function without the benefit
of consciousness, in order to cooperate with the body's own autonomous
homeostatic controls. For the artificially extended homeostatic control system
fuctioning unconsciously, one of us (Manfred Clynes) has coined the term
Cyborg." D.S. Halacy Jr. explains:
A person under the influence of psychoactive drugs (a type of technology) is also a type of cyborg, as Halacy Jr. conceptualizes in the same influential book as above: "In Huxley's book the soma dose was described as 'Half a gram is better than a
damn!' But only a few millionths of an ounce of LSD-25 sends the user into
hours of weird psychical fantasies and sometimes revelations concerning
esthetics, comprehension of his fellow man, the universe and even God. The
hallucinatory effects also include sight, sound, smell and taste... art work
done by some subjects using LSD-25 and other drugs indicates stimulation of
creativity." More recently, Donna Haraway put forth the cyborg concept as a metaphorical vehicle to give expression to a feminist critique, and in general to explain how it is, offering the following definition: "...post-Second World War hybrid entities made of, first, ourselves and other
organic creatures in our unchosen - 'high-technological' guise as information
systems, texts, and ergonomically controlled laboring, desiring, and
reproducing systems. The second essential ingredient in cyborgs is machines in
their guise, also, as communication systems, texts, and self-acting,
ergonomically designed apparatuses."
David Porush comments:
"As we survey the Cold War landscape, even as it recedes from us in the last
five years especially, everywhere we look we see a burgeoning of the computer
and enactment of a powerful drama between human and cybernetic technology, a
struggle between allegience to humanism and naturalism, on the one hand, and an
encouragement to systems of control and information on the other. Music, film,
literature, and dance express the labor pains of humans as they
give birth to themselves as a new order of being, what Burroughs called "a soft
machine," partly natural, partly artificial.. the cyborg. Some parts of the
culture celebrate this transformation, some mourn it, and even others inspect
it rationally as an inevitable evolutionary step."
As you can see,
"For millions of years mankind lived just like the animals Then something happened which unleashed the power of our imagination We learned to talk"-Stephen Hawking, sampled on 'Keep Talking'
"What exactly are cyborgs made of? Haraway calls them 'chimeras', 'mosaics' and 'hybrids'.
Steven Hawking comes to mind when she labels these creatures."
Stephen Hawking, who uses a computer called the Equalizer to communicate, is perhaps the world's most famous cyborg, as Michael Heim makes a point of. William Mitchell mentions Hawking as a cyborg in the Cyborg Citizens section of City of Bits: "Stephen Hawking, cyborg, speaks. Speaks? Stricken limbs and the Voltrax allophone generator built into his wheelchair team up to produce electronically mediated utterances. Immobilized flesh remains mute; fingers almost imperceptibly shift a joystick to select words from a displayed menu, then software and silicon retrieve stored sounds, assemble them into paragraphs, and emit them from speakers. Not the traditionally constituted body, but a new sort of electrosomatic construction now becomes the site of practice and project. August 1991. Yo-Yo Ma, hypercellist, plays on the stage at Tanglewood. 2 His wrist, bow, and cello are all wired with special sensors. A computer translates the signals from these sensors into synthetic sound that a large audience hears through multiple speakers. Performer, instrument, computer, and speaker system become one cybernetic organism. Where are his/its boundaries?"
We are all cyborgs now. Architects and urban designers of the digital era must begin by retheorizing the body in space."
"Wiener was not unaware of the ironies through which cybernetics would imperil the very liberal humanistic subject whose
origins are enmeshed with self-regulating machinery. Throughout his mature writings, he struggled to reconcile the tradition of
liberalism with the new cybernetic paradigm he was in the process of creating. When I think of him, I imagine him laboring
mightily to construct the mirror of the cyborg. He stands proudly before this product of his reflection, urging us to look into it so
we can see ourselves as control-communication devices, differing in no substantial regard from our mechanical brethren. Then he happens to glance over his shoulder, sees himself as a cyborg, and makes a horrified withdrawal."
[From morning to night I stayed out of sight Didn't recognise I'd become No more than alive I'd barely survive In a word . . . overrun]
"Here there is a sort of anthropomorphism of technology. We see this
with supplementary technologies, cardiac stimulators, with the
possibility of grafts, of techno-grafts, supplementary memory, as
Marvin Minsky proposes. We are on the verge of the biomachine.
Personally, I critique this, as the advent of the hyperstimulated man."
"The idea of the feedback loop implies that the boundaries of the autonomous subject are up for grabs, since feedback loops can flow not only within the subject but also between the subject and the environment. From Norbert Wiener on, the flow of information through feedback loops has been associated with the deconstruction of the liberal humanist subject, the version of the 'human' with which the posthuman is concerned."
The cyborg represents the reimagination of the human body in terms of the principles of cybernetics. In terms of the cybernetic paradigm, human beings can be thought of as information systems. System boundaries are defined by flows of information. In Cybernetics and Society (1950), Norbert Wiener sets forth this mode of thinking: "One thing at any rate is clear. The physical identity of an individual does not consist in the matter of which it is made... The biological individuality of an organism seems to lie in a certain continuity of process, and in the memory by the organism of the effects of its past development... "To recapitulate: the individuality of the body is that of a flame rather than that of a stone, of a form rather than as a bit of substance. This form can be transmitted or modified and duplicated, although at the present we know only how to duplicate it over a short distance." "The problem of the nature of human individuality and of the barrier which seperates one person from another is as old as human history." "...where man's word goes, and where his power of perception goes, to that point his control and in a sense his physical existence is extended." "We are not stuff that abides, but patterns that perpetuate
themselves. A pattern is a message, and may be transmitted as a
message."
"For cyborgs, then, the border between interiority and exteriority is
destabilized. Distinctions between self and other are open to reconstruction.
Difference becomes provisional."
Marshall McLuhan, a very well known communication theorist, took the ideas of Norbert Wiener, and expanded on their implications, it might be argued. McLuhan popularized such familiar aphorisms as "the medium is the message" and "Turn on, tune in and drop out." (which he suggested to Timothy Leary). McLuhan asserted that electric media are extensions of the nervous system--an idea that seems to have been suggested decades earlier by Norbert Wiener. When we communicate by means of electric media, like here or as musicians, for example, we are then "wearing the inside out". "We have modified our environment so radically that we must now modify ourselves in order to exist in this new environment." "However, even now the transportation of messages serves to
forward an extension of man's senses and his capabilities of
action from one end of the world to another."
"In the electric age we see ourselves being translated more and more into the form of information, moving toward the technological extension of consciousness."
"We have to numb our central nervous system when it is extended and exposed,
or we will die. Thus the age of anxiety and of electric media
is also the age of the unconscious and of apathy."
["I have become comfortably numb..."] McLuhan's thinking was very popular among youth during the 1960's. The thinking discussed in this message can be seen expressed by the members of Pink Floyd in "Pink Floyd Live at Pompeii". During the film, the members of the band discuss the relationship of their music to the electronics that they use:
"I don't think the equipment could take over, we do rely on it alot. I mean, I don't think we could do what we do, as we do, without it. We could still do a good entertaining musical show, I suppose, without it; but always things are down to how you control them, and whether you're controlling them, and not the other way around...
The concept of the cyborg inhabits a place in the collective mind and mythology of western civilization today. For more on that see The Bomb was a Cyborg, by David Porush. You Are Cyborg, by Harry Kunzru, is a relatively easy to understand article that appeared in Wired Magazine. Here are some snippets: "Beneath the surface she (Donna Haraway) says she has the same internal organs as everyone else - though it's not exactly the sort of thing you can ask her to prove in an interview. Yet Donna Haraway has proclaimed herself a cyborg, a quintessential technological body. (See 'The Cyborg Ancestry.') Sociologists and academics from around the world have taken her lead and come to the same conclusion about themselves. In terms of the general shift from thinking of individuals as isolated from the 'world' to thinking of them as nodes on networks, the 1990s may well be remembered as the beginning of the cyborg era... Norbert Wiener wrote Cybernetics, or Control and Communication in the Animal and Machine in 1948. The book was nothing if not ambitious. Wiener, an MIT mathematician, saw amazing similarities between a vast group of different phenomena. Catching a ball, guiding a missile, running a company, pumping blood around a body - all seemed to him to depend on the transmission of 'information,' a concept floated by Bell Laboratories' Claude Shannon in his founding work on information theory. More specifically, these processes seemed to depend on what the engineers had begun to call 'feedback.' The cyborgmakers were in the business of making Wiener's ideas flesh. For them, the body was just a meat computer running a collection of information systems that adjusted themselves in response to each other and their environment. If you wanted to make a better body, all you had to do was improve the feedback mechanisms, or plug in another system - an artificial heart, an all-seeing bionic eye. It's no accident that this strangely abstract picture of the body as a collection of networks sounds rather like that other network of networks, the Internet; both came out of the same hothouse of Cold War military research."
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"A man with a wooden leg is a cyborg. So is a man with an iron lung. More
loosely, a steam shovel operator or an airline pilot is a cyborg. As I type
this page I am a cybernetic organism, just as you are when you take pen in hand
to sign a check."
the word 'cyborg' has a many connotations, but the concept is most interesting as a metaphor for understanding and thinking about our relationship, as human beings, to technology.
You, as an individual jacked into 'cyberspace'
(defined loosely), are a
cyborg. Thus, "
"The sci-fi thriller The Lawnmower Man climaxes with a scene in which the fleshy body of the protagonist, Jobe
Smith, is spread-eagled like Leonardo's Vitruvian Man in a whirling sphere, while his electronic avatar courses
through the network. The camera cuts back and forth between the two conditions. As an ideally proportioned
body inscribed in a circle evokes the humanist subject for which Renaissance cities and the buildings of Alberti
and Bramante were made, so the fragmented figure of Jobe neatly suggests the incipient role of cities in the digital,
electronic era-to house and delight subjects who have become sites of intersection between physical space and
cyberspace...
In the book 'Cybernetics and
Society',
Norbert Wiener discusses his role in the development of speech replacement
devices, like the one used by Stephen Hawking . Communication between individuals, the essence of which is feedback,
is the core ingredient of human civilization and organizations in general. The advent of language, as Norbert Wiener
explains, allowed for humans to develop communities and civilizations of
greater and greater complexity. At the present, with the rapid proliferation
of communciations networks and virtual communities, along with the associated technologies, it seems alarmingly clear
that we are on something like a threshold in the development of human
civilizations, as well as individual human beings for that matter.
If the "individuality of an organism seems to lie in a certain continuity of process" (not in matter), then it would seem that in this "sea of random images", we are "the self-destructing animal".
The cyborg represents a paradigm shift in thinking
about our
relationship to technology. Tools are extentions of the body. When you drive a
car you are a cyborg. When you play an musical instrument you are a cyborg.
etc. The concept represents a new way of thinking in terms of cybernetics, where the unit of
the individual person is somewhat arbitrary. Katherine Hayles 
