Suchergebnisse

Books reviewed in this article:Bruno Latour and Emile Hermant, Paris ville invisibleWilliam J Mitchell, E‐topia: 'Urban life, Jim — but not as we know it'Antoine Picon, La ville territoire des cyborgs

The first generation of cyborgs is alive, well, walking among us, and even running. Pacemakers, renal dialysis machines and clumsy mechanical hands may not match the movie-image of cyborg enhancements, but they have been the leading wave. The legs of sprinter Oscar Pistorius, and implants of both the cochlear and RFID varieties, make more substantial changes to individuals. They also pose greater challenges to society as a whole. Cyborgisation will give rise to demands for new rights. People who have lost capabilities but have not yet got the relevant prostheses will seek the right to have them. Some people will demand the right not just to recover what they are missing, but also to enhance themselves. Others will demand the liberty not to have prostheses imposed on them. Enhanced humans will seek additional rights to go with the additional capabilities that they have. The political processes involved in lobbying for and resisting these desires will take many and varied forms. Professional engineers have an obligation to anticipate these developments, and to brief political, social and economic institutions on their nature, impact and implications. They have to date failed to do so. The rate of change is sufficiently brisk that action is urgent.

The first generation of cyborgs is alive, well, walking among us, and even running. Pacemakers, renal dialysis machines and clumsy mechanical hands may not match the movie-image of cyborg enhancements, but they have been the leading wave. The legs of sprinter Oscar Pistorius, and implants of both the cochlear and RFID varieties, make more substantial changes to individuals. They also pose greater challenges to society as a whole. Cyborgisation will give rise to demands for new rights. People who have lost capabilities but have not yet got the relevant prostheses will seek the right to have them. Some people will demand the right not just to recover what they are missing, but also to enhance themselves. Others will demand the liberty not to have prostheses imposed on them. Enhanced humans will seek additional rights to go with the additional capabilities that they have. The political processes involved in lobbying for and resisting these desires will take many and varied forms. Professional engineers have an obligation to anticipate these developments, and to brief political, social and economic institutions on their nature, impact and implications. They have to date failed to do so. The rate of change is sufficiently brisk that action is urgent.

The article is devoted to the analysis of ontic dispositions of modern reality. The modern reality is the post-, smart-, cyber-reality of the modern semi-artificial semi-living post-human cyborg. Imperatives that have been funding the cultural and ontic space of man for thousands of years, such as pain, fear, desire for pleasure, death, etc., are no longer in the zone of the sacred or metaphysical, but rather in the sphere of planned and pragmatically oriented technology. Modern cluster and virtual-based construction of the living world format the world around according to the patterns of information space, in which both time and space, technological or production chains, social ties, models of interaction and existence are formed in a smart and post-temporal and spatial paradigm that deconstructs the classical models of time, space and cultural environment as a whole. In the modern cultural environment and, accordingly, in the ontic space of the post-human cyborg, the logic of building a medial virtual-digital reality is incorporated. The article provides a cultural-philosophical and hermeneutical analysis of the main provisions of the new ontic space of modernity (logic of "logistics", binarism, "logic of order"). It is shown that in the virtual and digital life world there is a transformation of personal parameters: structures of thinking, patterns of behavior, as well as ways of self-identification. To describe this phenomenon, the term "digital identity" is proposed, and its characteristics are given: foundation by virtual-digital means, dematerialization of relationships and actions, prosthetics by network organs, subjective non-autonomy and obedience to orders. The authors draw conclusions about the nature and essential features of the posthuman cyborg as a natural product of the new virtual digital reality.

This chapter traces the emergence of the figure of the "cyborg" in feminist theory from the 1980s to the present, focusing specifically on how feminist engagements with this figure draw from and challenge broader discourses of the "posthuman." The key questions that emerge from the scholarship on the intersections of the organic and the technological include the following: (1) a set of epistemological challenges to the foundational binaries of modernist thought, and thus a feminist method for examining the mutual imbrication of nature and culture, human and nonhuman, machinic and organic; (2) a set of explorations of the intersections of material and virtual manifestations of the body through the extension of communications and media technologies; and (3) the importance of the figure of the "cyborg" to feminist accounts of political agency and critical subjectivity.

Cyborgs in Latin America explores the ways cultural expression in Latin America has grappled with the changing relationships between technology and human identity. The book takes a literary and cultural studies approach in examining narrative, film and advertising campaigns from Argentina, Bolivia, Chile, Mexico and Uruguay by such artists as Ricardo Piglia, Edmundo Paz Soldán, Carmen Boullosa and Alberto Fuguet among others. Using and criticizing theoretical models developed by Katherine Hayles, Donna Haraway, Gilles Deleuze and Michel Foucault, the book will appeal to specialists and students of Latin American Studies; Posthuman Theory; and Literature, Science and Technology Studies.