Cyborg World

   To live in a world of measured construction is to build one's humanity out of the selfsame clay - that is to say, we have arrived at the age in which the human can only be constructed recursively as the constructor of the constructed (or, to make it more maddening, the constructor of the constructor.) This falls in line with what Derrida predicted nearly 40 years ago - it is an age in which the structure of structures has become the focal point of reality: the center is not the center and yet the concept of center abides. It is in this climate that Harold Bloom wrote a book of over 700 pages called Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human. At first the concept seems ridiculous, but there is a definite science to it. The argument runs that before Shakespeare, characters were more or less flat in that they responded and changed to the external world. With Shakespeare comes the advent of the self-same listener or the self-same overhearer, characters with the psychological depth to manufacture thoughts fundamentally foreign to themselves (perhaps only because of the decay/movement of time) and to change because of overhearing their own thoughts. The redundancy that this model creates (replete with plays-in-plays and mirrors-in-mirrors) describes what Haraway calls "the cyborg [skipping] the step of original unity" (2192). It is a disunity, although a disunity of the fundamental self, that spontaneously overflows in selfsame interactions (like the grinding of plate tectonics) and creates new meaning, new worlds. The "fabricated hybrid of machine and organism" (2191) is a useful way of describing the modern condition in that we've isolated our ability to create identity from Nothing (the selfsame listener is also remarkably similar to the process of supplementarity) and thus we've arrived at "an ultimate self untied at last from all dependency" (2192). In place of this dependency comes fiercely intelligent pranksters who play with their self-invention: as Haraway says, "at the center of my ironic faith, my blasphemy, is the image of the cyborg" (2190). The curious thing about the cyborg is that the reciprocity of its nature, the self-folding and self-faulting, allows for an extreme array of freedoms from everything except that very self-creating existence itself - this is much of the cause of the existential torment that wracks Hamlet until he finds peace in a sort of genius trickery of self-cancellation. There is much hope in the idea of discovering oneself at the interstices of 'self' rather than the hub however - the next frontier is unknown and yet we're incontestably headed there. I'll give the great poet Wallace Stevens and the good singer songwriter John Pine the final word.

Wallace Stevens - Tea at the Palaz of Hoon

Not less because in purple I descended
The western day through what you called
The loneliest air, not less was I myself.

What was the ointment sprinkled on my beard?
What were the hymns that buzzed beside my ears?
What was the sea whose tide swept through me there?

Out of my mind the golden ointment rained,
And my ears made the blowing hymns they heard.
I was myself the compass of that sea:

I was the world in which I walked, and what I saw
Or heard or felt came not but from myself;
And there I found myself more truly and more strange.

Stevens, Wallace. ""Tea at the Palaz of Hoon'."http://poetry.poetryx.com. N.p., n.d. Web. <http://poetry.poetryx.com/poems/5322/>.

 Haraway. "A Manifesto for Cyborgs." ed. Leitch, Vincent B. The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism. 2nd ed. New York: W. W. Norton &, 2010. Print.