A Tragedy for Cyborgs

A Tragedy for Cyborgs

Christie, J. R. R. (John R. R.)

Configurations - Volume 1, Number 1, Winter 1993, pp. 171-196

E-ISSN: 1080-6520 Print ISSN: 1063-1801

DOI: 10.1353/con.1993.0001

http://muse.jhu.edu/login?uri=/journals/configurations/v001/1.1christie.html

Abstract

John R. R. Christie - A Tragedy for Cyborgs - Configurations 1:1 Configurations 1.1 (1993) 171-196. A Tragedy for Cyborgs John R. R. Christie University of Leeds There is a text that considers women, science, technology, politics, and the future, and it contains certain characteristic notions and qualities, set in particular relations one to another. It has learnt from Karl Marx .It is poised before a difficult and unknowable future, where the accelerated pace and "vertiginous violence" of science are recognized, and where the social structural effects of science are insisted upon, as is the necessity for reconstruction. It posits "woman," "free," with "no illusions," in a new and intensely intimate relationship with machines, necessary because she "could not go backward." It embraces complex, partial, and split personal identities, life marked by multiplicity and contradictions that resist unity and synthesis, life that "must merge in its supersensual multiverse, or succumb to it." Here, the questions of politics and science are not separate, but simultaneous and similar: "politics or science, the lesson was the same." Its analysis can invoke myth and goddess, while forswearing origin, "this Eden of their own invention." A favored setting for the stimulation of inquiry is the Exhibition Hall or Museum. The favored trope is irony, which hedges the historically informed imagination, exhilarated and perplexed, troubled and incited by science, as it...