When Man Becomes Machine : The Creation of ‘Symborgs’ in Pop Cultural Universes

Ewelina Twardoch When Man Becomes Machine : The Creation of Symborgs in Pop Cultural Universes Kultura Popularna nr 4 (38), 58-70 2013 58 kultura popularna 2013 nr 4 (38) When Man Becomes Machine Ewelina Twardoch The Creation of ‘Symborgs’ in Pop Cultural Universes “I want to see you not through the Machine” E. M. Forster, The Machine Stops DOI: 10.5604/16448340.1109982 E w e l i n a T wa r d o c h When man becomes machine Between Humans and Technological Tools The relationship between humans and technology has always been a concern of popular culture. What is more, popular culture is a ‘testing ground’ for numerous ideas and experiments stemming from the relationship which are impossible to carry out in other fields of human activity. The various worlds created by rich and vivid imagination of popular culture creators have often preceded and still are ahead of the ideas of scientists, and politicians. This might be due to the fact that ideas in the imagined worlds seem not as dan‑ gerous as in the real one, and the creative suggestions of popular culture’s creators are not taken as seriously. Besides, which seems to be the crucial issue, the field of popular culture has always been understood as an area of entertainment, amusement and ludic rituals, allowing for a more encom‑ passing approach to the universe of technology, it being both close to us and unfamiliar. According to Sheryl N. Hamilton: ‘Scientists themselves evoke the idea of science fiction as a way of capturing the incredible speed of technoscientific change’ (Hamilton 2013: 271). Regardless of the reasons for colonization of the world of popular culture by technological visions and solutions, it is worth to have a closer look at these two; all the more so since we as human beings are less autonomous in relation to technology than we would like to believe. According to Joanna Zylinska and Sarah Kember “we are – physically and ontologically – part of that technological environment”, since we “are not entirely distinct from our tools” (Kember and Zylinska 2012: 13). The ‘creative media’ project, proposed by Zylinska and Kember, is an interesting attempt to review our relationship with the media, which are strictly connected with technology. The concept of mediation presupposes that we are constantly dealing with the process of the emergence of the media, a process which consists of a range of various relations between some human and nonhuman actors, to employ the concepts of Bruno Latour’s ANT‑theory. The notion of the processual nature of media is crucial here, as it underlines the fact that we are dealing not just with individual media objects as a television set or a computer, but, significantly, with relations between these objects, between us and these objects and a number of others factors that have an impact on them. Hence Zylinska and Kember’s claim follows: “we have always been mediated” and “we have always been technical” (Zylinska and Kember 2012: 18). The argument, of course, does not equate media with technology; it solely points to the fact that both media and technology may not be reduced to certain objects, or tools; that technology such as media is a process which involves human beings. Zylinska nad Kember follow Heidegger, whose ideas inspired the ‘creative media’ project, and claim that we are not only the users of technology, having control over technological world in the era of mobile media when life is run with mobiles, notebooks and other electronic devices, but that we have always been “chained to technology”, as Heidegger boldly declared in The Questions Concerning Technology (Heidegger 1977: 1). The ar‑ gument, however, goes further than the famous McLuhan’s statement that the media are our prostheses. The mobile tools are not only an extension of our body, something external to our being; they develop with us and our connections with technological tools constitute the core of technology. Thus, the crucial concept turns out to be our originary technicity [ Martin Heidegger’s 59 Ewelina Twardoch is a PhD candidate at the Jagiellonian Univeristy (Institute of Audiovisual Arts) and the SET program. Her dissertation concerns the represen‑ tations and functions of biometric data in the new media art. 60 1 More on that subject in: W.R. Newman, Promethean Ambitions: Alchemy and the Quest to Perfect Nature, Chicago 2004, p. 183. kultura popularna 2013 nr 4 (38) terms as interpreted by Bernard Stiegler – E. T. ], our way of being‑with and merging‑with technology’ (Zylinska and Kember 2012: 14). In his book Technics and Time, 1 Bernard Stiegler recalls the story of Pro‑ metheus, which serves as an apt illustration of the relations between humans and technological tools (Stiegler 1998: 185 – 187, 202 – 203). Prometheus is set out to be a figure who establishes the relationship between a human being and technology. Not only did he give people fire, he also pointed to a new way of development. At first, technology was out of humanity’s reach; thanks to Prometheus it became a part of human environment and a human way of discovering abilities (cf. Zylinska and Kember 2012: 15). The Prometheus myth is also a story about humans becoming technological beings. There‑ after, the development of technology is associated with the development of a human, and complementarily, the evolution of human condition runs parallel to technological advances. The story offers an answer to the question of the arbitrary status of technological tools. If technology is perceived merely as a set of objects which we use to satisfy our needs and which we are capable of managing, where do the human fears of technology, reflected in popular culture stories, originate? Human attitude toward technology seems to be just as ambiguous. On the one hand, technology precedes humans, and we can only reach out to it; on the other, we want to take control of it, because we are convinced that we are able to hold it in our power. Thus, we see ourselves both as beings subordinate to technology and dependent on it, and as creatures who have sufficient capacity and power to have technology subordinated. Therefore, it seems that our coexistence with technology is based primarily on the ne‑ gotiation of power and, in fact, it is so (also literally, as it is no secret that most technological innovation was in the first place produced for the army (cf. Dinello 2005: 88)), though this relation is not reducible solely to this process. The issue of this peculiar symbiosis involves a number of our daily practices as well; first of all, various transformations of identity both in the human and nonhuman beings. The merging of our being with technology transpires mainly in the two approaches. One practice associated with the humans’ desire to control technology and to be a creator of a half‑human/half‑technological identity is the attempt to create the so‑called ‘artificial man’. The expression of the desire to create an artificial (...truncated)