ACLA 2006 Annual Meeting: The Human and Its Others

This panel will consider the concept of the cyborg not merely as the actual augmentation of the body with machinery, but rather as an acknowledgement that the organic is inherently mechanical. Today it is impossible to separate technology from biology, as new interventions in the body take the form of cloning and chimerical hybrids of human and animal genetic material. This development seems to signal a new victory over our natural limitations as we strive to become what Freud called a “prosthetic god,” following the path toward a technological utopia already manifest in Robert Hooke’s seventeenth century paean to the microscope. Every technology, however, functions through a tacit acceptance of our integration into nature, blending the human, the mechanical, and the animal. This constellation is not original to the present, but recurs at times that coincide with a crisis in our definition of the human. It is no accident that La Mettrie theorized the human as a machine at the same moment that Linnaeus created a classification system that made humans full members of the primate order in the animal kingdom. We seek original papers that examine the current crisis of what it means to be human without losing sight of the past. Is the “cyborg” still a useful term or has it become so ubiquitous today as to have lost its “proper” (i.e. hybrid) meaning? Are terms like the “post-human” (K. Hayles) or the “symbiont” (G. Longo) any better?

Friday, March 24

Carsten Strathausen, University of Missouri
“The Cyborg Challenge”
F. Scott Scribner, University of Hartford
“The Cut of Judgment: Evolution and the Technology of Aesthetic Self-Transfiguration”
Elizabeth Swanstrom, UCSB
“SoftBot, Knowbot, WebBot, or No-bot? How the Robot Lost Its Body in the Age of Information”
Peter Gilgen, Cornell University
“The Decay of Lying, or Resistance is Futile”

Saturday, March 25

Sara Eigen, Vanderbilt University
“Eugenic Interruptions: Between Metaphysics and Technology in the Eighteenth Century”
Stefani Engelstein, University of Missouri
“Fleeing the Monster: What Frankenstein Tells Us About Genetic Chimeras”
Stephanie Rowe, Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University
“Barbarous Sophisms: Human-Animal Disaffiliation in John Oswald’s The Cry of Nature”
Christina Gerhardt, University of California at Berkeley
“Cyborgs: The Nexus of Bios and Technos”

Sunday, March 26

Bjoern Nansen, University of Melbourne
“Death of the Iron Lung Cyborg”
Ariel Fuenzalida, University of Western Ontario
“Materia Psychonautica: Post-cyborgian Theory & Machinic Intoxication”
Lynn Houston, California State University, Chico
“The Toxic-Body As The New Cyborg”
Raymond Oenbring, University of Washington
“Cyborg, Bride of Frankenfood: A Rhetorical Analysis of the Organic Food Movement”