After the courses this week, it comes up with me several questions: How does the evolution of rhetoric influence the cyborg discourse? Why is the issue of cyborg critical nowadays?
If we want to answer these questions, we need to trace back to the western history of revival humanism and the rhetoric. Rhetoric derives from the Greek philosophy, meaning public speaking in civic purpose. It gradually becomes a professional technique which follows a certain pattern, like proemion (introduction), diegesis (summary of events or subject), pistis (proof and evidence), Epipistis (why this evidence matters), ekenkhos (refutation of opposing claims), and epanodos (conclusion) (Bogost 17). Most influential philosopher to the rise of reason and humanism is Aristotle. His rhetoric discourse brings forward the prototype of deduction and induction, both of which the crucial theme of humanism and science revolution.
As we know that Descartes who advocates deduction is one of the most prominent pioneers of humanism and philosopher during the science revolution era. Aristotle’s discourse evidently leads to the rising of humanism. Like Descartes’s suggestion “I think therefore I am (Cogito ergo sum)”, he thinks that mind and thinking determine the existence of human. Descartes’s discourse has two different interpretations: on the other hand, human finally get rid of god, becoming the center of the world. On the other hand, the mind surpasses the body, becoming the domination of the subject of a human. As Descartes’s discourse, if the mind is superior to the body, it causes the problem of total separation of the mental and the physical, that is, the Cartesian dualism. Such dualism affects western culture profoundly. Indeed, dualism promotes the scientific revolution and the western hegemony, but we can say that all kind of dichotomy such as god/human, animal/human, machine/human is the aftermath of it.
It is such dualism that makes the cyborg a delicate issue in the contemporary age. If we are trapped into the conventional dichotomy of machine/mankind, we will feel threatened by the machine rather than embrace the pleasure of posthumanism. As Hayles’s suggestion in “Toward Embodied Virtuality”, we should break the dualism to embrace more possibilities of human beings:
my dream is a version of the posthuman that embraces the possibilities of information technologies without being seduced by fantasies of unlimited power and disembodied immortality, that recognizes and celebrates finitude as a condition of human being, and that understands human life is embedded in a material world of great complexity (Hayles 5).
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