Taking the cyborg a step further through (non?) fiction

Gilroy calls for a new humanism, while Haraway uses the cyborg to get beyond the human. As I’ve mentioned, I think that rethinking the human is the most efficient way to get beyond hierarchical ideas about human difference, ideas that are embedded in the word “human.” However, I also think we can use this strategy to work toward Gilroy’s goal of eliminating the concept of race.

But to do this, we need new language structures not built on binaries. After reading several science fiction stories in preparation for this project, including Nova and He/She/It, I’m dissatisfied with descriptions of cyborgs that reimagine but also subscribe gender, race and nationality.

The idea of science fiction as tarot-like — as well as a fascinating parallel I read in the novella “Story of Your Life” by Ted Chiang, which uses Fermat’s Principle in physics to collapse the temporal order of cause and effect — is helping me to understand how it can be about the future and present at the same time. I’ve noticed several works commenting on the present by using inter-planet tensions as an allegory for international tensions. Instead of exploring what subjectivity will be like in the future, I want to imagine a future without anything like the subject, a concept built on problematic ideas of difference. Instead of using the future to talk about the social structures of the present, I will use it to talk about their equally current disintegration.

I want to write my own short story that explores how a cyborgean view of the human can eliminate concepts we need to get by today — clichés whose disappearance would demobilize our current society — including racial metaphors and, by necessity, the very notion of the subject, which is coded in terms of difference. To do this, I will devise alterations in English grammar, like Delaney and other science fiction authors, and see how far I can go in creating a new way of thinking without completely losing the reader. I want to lose the reader to an extent, though, because of the productivity of frustration (Gonzalez). I hope that readers become frustrated by my lack of revealing what the characters are (in terms of race, gender, etc.). I’m contemplating trying to write without first- or second-person pronouns to avoid the notion of the subject and the object, the mind/matter distinction, and the isolated wholeness of the self.

I’m not sure what the plot is, but it will be post-apocalyptic, post-identity and utopian (or at least anti-anti-utopian) and will incorporate philosophy of mind (a lot of my knowledge of cyborgs comes from thought experiments by such philosophers, and you can't rethink the human without rethinking the mind/body duality).