I've posted before about my fascination with the ways that any given tool that we use is embedded in and embeds us in a vast and seemingly endless web of interconnected effects. It's not a new idea and certainly not my idea, but there is something exceptionally awesome, in the more traditional sense of the word, about the ways that techne shapes us through and through, body and mind, time and space.
How do we define the boundaries of ourselves if we look at ourselves from this perspective? Is the object an effect of my intention or am I the effect of its form? The notion of the cyborg as Donna Haraway defines it raises just these questions. You don't have to have a machine inside you to be a cyborg; the machines around you shape you, define your landscapes of potential and the horizons of your limitation. The question of "inside" and "outside" becomes a very tricky one in cyborg space.
IF THE ONLY TOOL YOU HAVE IS A HAMMER, EVERY THING BECOMES A NAIL sort of thing?
There is a scene in Battlestar G. when Ellen comes out of the resurrection goo (or whatever it is called) and there is a sentry all metallic and shiny that when asked to help her out, offers her a deadly hand with precision points. When she recoils slightly it folds the tips back and offers a more "hand like" hand.
I loved the scene so much! In our rendering we can offer elegance to the machine, can the machine offer compassion in return?
(Humans make judgements faster than any machine ever will and yet we can fall victim to this very capacity when we miss an essential truth no matter how insignificant. So we try to nail down ALL the facts, as many as possible because we are so good at it. When we hold fast this accounting and refuse to let go of it, in the face of realization it can cause un told suffering. It can cost us our lives. This is never true for a machine.)
Going back to that wonderful scene, that gracious offering of aid to what formerly was a despicable character, (Ellen, she made me shudder with shame) a drunk, a whore, an ambitious clawing harpie,
and on the
other hand a killing machine, (whoa!)
it turns into an iconic picture of chivlry, the machine is the knight and the whore is lady, or the machine is the nurse, and whore is new born babe...
There are activities that are profoundly compassionate and beautiful and when released from our definitions of "self and other" we realise them even in our limited locations, our limited definitions of self.