Final Exam

Reading (W/) the Digital Human is a course which examines the different ways technology has contributed to our understanding of what it means to be human. Through Massumi, we examined how technology functions as a partial subject, and is therefore crucial to our existence as humans. What Technology Wants provided another (and, some would argue, overly rigid) framework for understanding the role technology plays in the lives of humans. Both of these works had in common a similar tendency to define by interdefining—humanity was defined in relation to other animals as well as technology, and in the case of What Technology Wants, the characteristics of technology were compared incessantly to those of other life forms to establish patterns between different kinds of being, and also to examine the differences. It would appear that it is impossible to define any type of being without reference to other types of being. In support of this observation, Parables for the Virtual offered a metaphysics in which no being was complete unto itself and each only existed as a “partial subject,” a being with the ability to interact with other beings. It was this interaction that defined the different sorts of being; in the same way, humans are defined not by their own existence, but by how they interact with other existent beings. By examining the ways in which humans interact with technology, Reading (W/) the Digital Human created a long, messy web of (inter)defintion for what it means to be human.

The obvious choice for a text to be added to this course would be Donna Haraway’s “A Manifesto for Cyborgs,” which lays a philosophical foundation for cyborg existence (as Neuromancer could be said to provide a practical model of how cyborg existence might become possible). Haraway embraces a more interactive definition of humanity, purged of the mythical essential human—a cyborg culture would be based on the assumption that we were all born (created) “a hybrid of machine and organism”. To be human (or to be existent) is to be a cyborg, a shifting web of “contradictions that do not resolve into larger wholes”. For a cyborg, to exist is not to be a whole—it is to be interdefined, to contain and be contained by other existences.