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A Course in Cyborg Semiotics: Encoding and Decoding the Technorganism

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A Course in Cyborg Semiotics: Encoding and Decoding the Technorganism A COURSE IN CYBORG SEMIOTICS: ENCODING AND DECODING THE TECHNORGANISM by Michael Ray Howard II A Dissertation Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirement for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy in English Middle Tennessee State University August 2016 Dissertation Committee: Dr. Marion Hollings, Chair Dr. Elyce Helford Dr. David Lavery I dedicate this research to my wife and children. You are the only organisms I want comprising Family. ii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS First, I would like to express my thanks to Middle Tennessee State University for its support of my research. In particular, I appreciate the support of the College of Graduate Studies and the College of Arts and Sciences. Without the funding provided by the College of Graduate Studies and the ability to work as a graduate teaching assistant, I would have been unable to even begin my research, and the College of Arts and Sciences provided both logistic and financial support for the Catwoman to Katniss: Heroines and Villainesses in Science Fiction and Fantasy conference which I co-organized, and which heavily influenced my research. I would also like to thank Langston University for hiring me as an Assistant Professor while still working on this project and for granting me the course releases necessary to complete it. Next, I must individually acknowledge my marvelous committee members: my Chair, Dr. Marion Hollings, and my Readers, Dr. Elyce Helford and Dr. David Lavery. Dr. Hollings helped me organize disparate and tumultuous thoughts that had been running through my head for years and find a rational focus for them; without her guidance, this project may have never come together in a cohesive manner. Dr. Helford has been an involved and dedicated mentor throughout my research, serving a sponsor for the Catwoman to Katniss conference and as senior editor for the resultant The Woman Fantastic in Contemporary Media Culture book; her ceaseless questioning of my work pushed me to struggle with my own ideas. Dr. Lavery has been a constant stalwart and supporter on my behalf; his encouragement and belief in me through my darkest hours helped me persevere despite the most challenging obstacles during my graduate career. Past mentors from the University of Alaska Anchorage, Toby Widdicombe, Dan Kline, Lori Mumpower, and Jennifer Stone, helped hone my scholarly edge during my Masters program to the point that I could cut through the challenges of my doctoral program; without their early intervention, I would have never been in a position to write this dissertation. Also, two noted scholars, Chris Hables Gray and Steven Mentor, were kind enough to take the time to have conversations with me about this project; both their thoughts and their published scholarship were certainly influential in bringing this project to its current form. Additionally, I wish to acknowledge the other two members of the Triad (so dubbed by Dr. Helford for our constant intertwining of our projects under her guidance throughout our doctoral work), Shiloh Carroll and Sarah Gray, for their dedication to the Catwoman to Katniss conference and the subsequent The Woman Fantastic book. We spent countless hours working together on these two projects, and both strongly informed my research. I would also like to thank my parents for their belief in me and my dreams and for raising me to believe that I could achieve them. My children, Justice, Griffin, and Avalon, have been firm believers in me as well despite the sacrifices we have had to make. Finally, to my wife, Tammy. I am a better person with you in my life, and without your support and unwavering dedication to both myself and us as a family, there is no way I could have achieved this dream. iii ABSTRACT Cyborg theorists such as Donna Haraway often comment that cyborgs “signify”; however, the nature of cyborg signification is largely underexplored. This dissertation seeks to provide an explanation within a structuralist paradigm for the unique manner in which cyborgs signify. Positioning the cyborg as neither a futuristic posthuman fusion of bodies and radical technologies envisioned in science fiction, nor yet as the post-World War II unintegrated yet technologically qualitatively more sophisticated construct suggested by noted cyborg theorists such as Haraway and Chris Hables Gray, I argue with Andy Clark and Bruce Mazlish that the cyborg condition is inherent to being human. Clark contends that humans are hardwired to accept technology as a part of their identities, while Mazlish claims that the rejection of the integrated nature of technology with humanity creates a discontinuity that leads to a misunderstanding of the human condition. Cyborg semiotics, then, redresses this perceived discontinuity, revealing the intrinsic nature of technology to signifying as human. Cyborg semiotics must follow the same rules as any other signifying system. To demonstrate the specific manner in which cyborgs signify, I return to Ferdinand de Saussure’s definitive work, A Course in General Linguistics, and apply the rules which he establishes for a linguistic system to those of a cybernetic system (or cy-syst). For example, I explore the arbitrary nature of the cybernetic sign (for which I have created the neologism cygn for the cybernetic equivalent of the linguistic sign). This exploration reveals the possibility of resistance to traditional culturally constructed interpretations of cygns. The unique combinations that form specific cygns are comprised of individual elements in the same manner that words are formed out of individual letters; however, instead of vowels and consonants, cygns are comprised of bodies and technologies. Just like the physical letters (either the written letters or sounds vibrating in the air) that form words have no bearing on the meaning of the word, the physical components of a cygn are also unrelated to the meaning associated with it. In each case, the associated meaning is culturally constructed; there is no intrinsic relationship between the parts and the whole. Since cy-systs function as signifying systems, the ramifications of other theories regarding such systems may be applied equitably to them. For instance, examining Derridian concepts such as sous rature and supplementation within the context of cyborg semiotics reveals the manner in which alternate technologies may be used to cygnify within a cy-syst or even displace functions previously identified as essential to the biological organism. Furthermore, exploring Foucault’s models in “The Discourse on Language” reveals the nuances of technologies of power as they apply within cybernetic systems. All of these applications are considered within the parameters of feminist inquiry, which is used as one possible (although by no means the only) extension of cyborg semiotics. iv TABLE OF CONTENTS LIST OF FIGURES ........................................................................................................... vi INTRODUCTION ...............................................................................................................2 CHAPTER ONE: AN INTRODUCTION TO CYBORG SEMIOTICS ...........................15 CHAPTER TWO: PRINCIPLES OF CYBORG SEMIOTICS .........................................54 CHAPTER THREE: CYBERNETIC VALUATION AND GRAMMAR ........................82 CHAPTER FOUR: THE DECONSTRUCTION OF CYBORG SEMIOTICS ...............137 CHAPTER FIVE: THE DISCOURSE ON CY-SYSTS ..................................................155 CONCLUSION: CYBORGS PAST AND FUTURE ......................................................178 WORKS CITED ..............................................................................................................186 APPENDICES .................................................................................................................192 APPENDIX A: GLOSSARY OF TERMS FOR CYBORG SEMIOTICS ......................193 v LIST OF FIGURES FIGURE 1: COMMON ASSUMPTIONS ABOUT THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN WORD AND OBJECT ......................................................................................................54 FIGURE 2: SAUSSURE’S DEMONSTRATION OF THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN SIGNIFIER AND SIGNIFIED ..........................................................................................55 FIGURE 3: OSMOTIC PUMP MOUSE .........................................................................141 FIGURE 4: DRAG QUEEN DUAL-CYGNIFYING ......................................................152 vi 1 Cyborg politics is the struggle for language and the struggle against perfect communication, against the one code that translates all meaning perfectly, the central dogma of phallogocentrism. That is why cyborg politics insist on noise and advocate pollution, rejoicing in the illegitimate fusions of animal and machine. These are the couplings which make Man and Woman so problematic, subverting the structure of desire, the force imagined to generate language and gender, and so subverting the structure and modes of reproduction of ‘Western’ identity, of nature and culture, of mirror and eye, slave and master, body and mind. ‘We’ did not originally choose to be cyborgs, but choice grounds a liberal politics and epistemology that imagines the reproduction of individuals before the wider replications of ‘texts’. (Donna Haraway, “A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century”) In short, the body, and its constitutive parts, behaves much like a signifier within a postmodern information system, its meaning determined
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