Module 4 : Culture Industries, Cultural Forms

Lecture 7 : Cyberculture


Before we conclude let us look at three important cyberculture critics and their core formulations.

•  Katherine N. Hayles notes that in the broad framework and discourse of cyberculture, “humans were to be seen primarily as information-processing entities who were essentially similar to intelligent machines.” She refers to the “the complex interplays between embodied forms of subjectivity and arguments for disembodiment throughout the cybernetic tradition.”

•  Donna Haraway in one of her most famous works, an essay entitled “The Manifesto for Cyborgs” (1985) argues:

“A cyborg is a cybernetic organism, a hybrid of machine and organism, a creature of social reality as well as a creature of fiction. Social reality is lived social relations, our most important political construction, a world-changing fiction...”

“The boundary between science fiction and social reality is an optical illusion…”

“By the late twentieth century, our time … we are all chimeras, theorized and fabricated hybrids of machine and organism: in short we are cyborgs. The cyborg is our ontology , it gives us our politics.”