Chris Gray
Biography
Chris Hables Gray, born 1953. He took a BA from Stanford in 1975 under the interdepartmental major Human Values and Social Change, and a Ph.D. in History of Consciousness from the University of California at Santa Cruz in 1991, with the dissertation "Computers as Weapons and Metaphors: The U.S. Military 1940-1990 and Postmodern War."[1]
His career runs unusually wide of the standard academic path. He was research director and traveling organizer for the South Africa Catalyst Project from 1979 to 1981, then worked as a software consultant and technical writer at Zetetic Software and Square One Software in Santa Cruz and Aptos, and as a writer and consultant at Hewlett-Packard in Corvallis from 1994 to 1995.[2] Academic appointments include Oregon State University's History Department from 1992 to 1996, Goddard College from 1994, the University of Great Falls in Montana from 1996, and guest professor and Eisenhower Fellow at Masaryk University in Brno in 1995.[2] He was a fellow at the Oregon State University Center for the Humanities from 1992 to 1994.[3]
He has since been Professor and Core Faculty in Interdisciplinary Studies at the Graduate College of the Union Institute and University, Continuing Lecturer and Fellow at Crown College, University of California at Santa Cruz, and Lecturer in Humanities and Communication at California State University Monterey Bay.[1][4] He has published over 200 articles and book chapters.[4]
His long-running collaborators are Steven Mentor and Heidi Figueroa-Sarriera, co-editors of The Cyborg Handbook and of Modified.[5]
Projects
The Cyborg Handbook
See The Cyborg Handbook. Gray was lead editor, with Figueroa-Sarriera and Mentor, published 1995.[4] The volume assembled writing by scientists, cultural critics, and fiction writers on cyborg technology, and reprinted primary sources including Clynes and Kline's 1960 paper coining the term for space medicine.[6]
Postmodern War
Postmodern War: The New Politics of Conflict, Guilford Press, 1997. Translated into Chinese and Turkish.[6] The argument concerns how the American military's use of technology changes the experience of war by altering what war requires of soldiers.[6]
His related paper "Posthuman Soldiers in Postmodern War" (2003) takes human-machine weapon systems as the defining feature of the period since 1939, and sorts the resulting militarized bodies into pilot-cyborgs and teleoperators, info-cyborgs covering everyone who serves the computers and weapons systems, and fighting cyborg soldiers and sailors.[7]
Cyborg Citizen
Cyborg Citizen: Politics in the Posthuman Age, Routledge, 2001. Translated into German.[6] The book asks what politics looks like once everyone and everything has been cyborged, and answers with an argument for embodied citizenship.[8]
Gray's position is that cyborg citizens are real political bodies, and he sets out a Cyborg Bill of Rights to that effect.[8] He rejects the separation of network from world, holding that the Net is part of the real world and that one cannot disrupt its fabric without risking a real body, and concludes that protest capable of producing fundamental political change is embodied protest.[8]
Modified: Living as a Cyborg
Edited with Figueroa-Sarriera and Mentor, Routledge, 2018. A collection of essays on lived experience of cyborg embodiment rather than on the concept.[9]
Post-sapiens
A 2017 paper in the Journal of Posthuman Studies arguing that the vocabulary for talking about the near human future has proliferated without gaining precision, producing a human identity crisis.[4] Gray examines the origins and politics of human, Homo sapiens sapiens, posthuman, transhuman, robot, drone, and cyborg, and proposes evolutionary biology as the basis for choosing terminology.[4] The term he proposes is post-sapiens, which he uses to mark the transition from natural and artificial selection to participatory selection as the driver of human evolution.[4]
Books
- The Cyborg Handbook, ed. with Heidi Figueroa-Sarriera and Steven Mentor. Routledge, 1995.
- Technohistory: Using the History of American Technology in Interdisciplinary Research, ed. 1996.
- Postmodern War: The New Politics of Conflict. Guilford Press, 1997.
- Cyborg Citizen: Politics in the Posthuman Age. Routledge, 2001.
- Peace, War, and Computers. Routledge, 2005.
- Modified: Living as a Cyborg, ed. with Figueroa-Sarriera and Mentor. Routledge, 2018.
Further Reading
- The Cyborg Handbook
- Cyborgs and Citadels
- Gary Lee Downey
- Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature
- The Gendered Cyborg: A Reader
- How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics
- The Prosthetic Impulse: From a Posthuman Present to a Biocultural Future
- The Cybercultures Reader
- Cyborg: Digital Destiny and Human Possibility in the Age of the Wearable Computer
- Feedback and Cybernetics: Reimaging the Body in the Age of the Cyborg
- War Of The Worlds: Cyberspace And The High-tech Assault On Reality
- The Uncanny: Experiments in Cyborg Culture
External Links
- chrishablesgray.org
- Biography, Lifeboat Foundation
References
- ↑ 1.0 1.1 Professor Chris Hables Gray, Lifeboat Foundation.
- ↑ 2.0 2.1 Gray, Chris Hables, Encyclopedia.com.
- ↑ "There Will Be War!": Future War Fantasies and Militaristic Science Fiction in the 1980s, Science Fiction Studies.
- ↑ 4.0 4.1 4.2 4.3 4.4 4.5 Post-sapiens: Notes on the Politics of Future Human Terminology, Journal of Posthuman Studies.
- ↑ On Terrorwar: An Interview with Chris Hables Gray, Cultural Politics.
- ↑ 6.0 6.1 6.2 6.3 Gray, Chris Hables 1953-, Encyclopedia.com.
- ↑ Posthuman Soldiers in Postmodern War, Body & Society, 2003.
- ↑ 8.0 8.1 8.2 Review of Cyborg Citizen, Pramod K. Nayar, Culture Machine.
- ↑ Modified: Living as a Cyborg, Routledge.
