History and Past Activities
|
|
History and Past Activities |
John Monk
Faculty of Technology,
Open University,
Milton Keynes,
MK7 6AA
Telephone: +44 1908 653797
E-mail: j.monk@open.ac.uk
Cyborgs, Language and Technology
Haraway's Cyborg manifesto aimed to remove distinctions and thus render certain uses of language ineffectual or perhaps in Wittgensteinian terms it questioned the implicit rules of certain language games and tried to make those games unfulfilling even as a pastime. This tactic might also be turned on language itself to question any distinctions made between language and technology.
Seeing language as a technology has its dangers when people, for instance, follow Leibnitz's lead and seek to comprehensively rebuild language, yet it does allow critics to draw fruitful parallels between such linguistic projects and authoritarian developments of cityscapes, computerised bureaucracies, transport schemes, education systems and hydro-electric installations. Put the other way around, new insights into technology are likely to emerge when the whole gamut of theories surrounding language is redeployed in the analysis of technology. Following Richard Rorty, for instance, technology would not be seen as a medium between people but an indissoluble part of being human. As with Haraway's cyborgs, we become inseparable from our technology.
Through the interplay of artefacts including language elements wide ranging technologies influence the appearance of their subsidiary language games and language games appear to affect artefacts. Some games are competitive, some are convivial, some induce uncertainty, others reinforce rituals, some underline superiority, others promote sociability. Thus technology games shape power relationships, and, through the technologies of money and commodity trading, economic relationships. We, as cyborgs, participate in these technology games in which new uses for old artefacts, like metaphor, realign our concerns and anxieties and play their part in politics.
Sociology of Science and Technology NETwork - last update: April 2006