2008.05.16

HUMAN



*media as extensions or prostheses
-“All media are extensions of some human faculty -- psychic or physical.”
-“The wheel is an extension of the foot...the book is an extension of the eye...clothing, an extension of the skin...”

*ratio of the senses
-McLuhan, in Understanding Media, claims that every new medium institutes new ratios between our senses
-the introduction of new media serve as "extensions" to ourselves and, simultaneously, they "amputate" various capacities of subjectivity.

*media as mirrors versus media as prostheses
-medium as mirrorwe see “ourselves” in the medium
-medium as prosthesiswe are radically altered by a medium

*media studies
-definition
media studies is the theory and practice of exploring how people and things are connected, reflected, extended, reconfigured, and separated by technologies and techniques
-> mirrors, machinations, prostheses
+digital media studies
A kind of media studies that pays especial attention to the techniques and technologies of computers and computer networks

*mediation: how are we connected/separated?
-hypertexts
-networks
-documentary methodidentification (or even, “more than identification”)
-prostheses/extensions
-Haraway’s proposals (human-animal, machine-organism)
-physical-non-physical (e.g., molecular-scale machines of electromagnetism and light)

*democratic, liberal politics
-one of the good assumptions about democratic politics:
we are all equal (i.e., “universal man”)
-one of the unrealistic assumptions about democratic politics:
we are all equal (i.e., “universal man”)

*biopolitics
-biopolitics: politics carried out through the means, the techniques and technologies of health and illness, statistics, the census, epidemiology and demography, the science of race, eugenics, population, abortion, genomics, and new reproductive technologies.

*chimera: “identities” of mixtures & fusions
-Mythology: A fabled fire-breathing monster of Greek mythology, with a lion's head, a goat's body, and a serpent's tail (or according to others with the heads of a lion, a goat, and a serpent), killed by Bellerophon.
-Painting, Archicture: A grotesque monster, formed of the parts of various animals.
-Literature: An unreal creature of the imagination
-Biology: [ad. G. chimäre (H. Winkler 1907, in Ber. d. Deut. Bot. Ges. XXV. 574).]
An organism (commonly a plant) in which tissues of genetically different constitution co-exist as a result of grafting, mutation, or some other process.

*cyborg
-definition
A cyborg is a cybernetic organism, a hybrid machine and organism, a creature of social reality as well as a creature of fiction.
-a cyborg world
(one perspective)
About the final imposition of a grid of control on the planet, about the final abstraction embodied in a Star Wars apocalypse waged in the name of defense, about the final appropriation of women’s bodies in a masculinist orgy of war.
(another perspective)
About lived social and bodily realities in which people are not afraid of their joint kinship with animals and machines, not afraid of permanently partial identities and contradictory standpoints.
-cyborg politics & coding
>a means of short-circuiting differences of identity and institutional boundaries.
>by recoding we redefine the understanding of our biological links to others
>one of the means to (re)connect people is through (re)coding systems because