Aestheticyborgian

By Aaron Parkhurst
 
Starting from mid February, news stories concerning self–proclaimed cyborg Neil Harbisson made their way across the internet.  Neil wrote an editorial for the BBC on the 15th, and the story has migrated through international media and online socio and techno–bloggers.  Neil was diagnosed as a child with achromatopsia, an incurable vision disorder that only allowed him to see in grey–scale, and could not perceive or distinguish colours.  In 2003, while in art school, he went to a cybernetics lecture given by Adam Montandon.  The two then developed a way for Harbisson to experience colour.  The solution is the ‘eyeborg’.  The device is a camera that hangs in front of the face.  It sends visual signals to a chip in the back of the head that converts the signals to real–time sound waves.  Neil hears colours, not through his ears, but through his bone.  In 2004, Neil encountered some red–tape.  He was unable to renew his UK passport because they would not let him appear at the passport office with electronic equipment on his head.  Harbisson insisted that he had become a cyborg, and that the equipment was part of his body.  After a collaborative effort, he was able to receive recognition from the passport office that he was, indeed, a cyborg, and the equipment was part of his body.

The story is interesting, and I am encouraged by the UK’s adaptability in this case to recognize an individual’s needs in the face of an emerging identity.  Political triumphs aside, however, Neil’s cyborgian self is a fascinating phenomenon.  I have read the comments regarding Neil’s passport photo.  There exists a critical debate on the nature of his eyeborg as something philosophically separate from the terms of engagement that the human body has long held with technology.  It would be offensive, for example, for the border agency to require an amputee to remove a prosthetic arm for a photo, or a victim of facial injury to remove a prosthetic eye.  It would also be illogical. As a passport photo’s sole purpose is to visually represent a particular person as they normally are, it might be irrational to ask an individual to remove an aesthetic that has become inherent to the appearance of one’s physical identity.  My understanding is that, in the UK, women who wear headscarves as part of their cultural and/or religious position are allowed, and now often encouraged, to wear their scarves in a passport photo.  If head scarves are perceived as a type of permissible cultural technology, why shouldn’t the eyeborg, which Neil admits he hasn’t removed from his head in 8 years, be recognized as such, at least for identification?  I question, then, the 2004 recognition by the UK Identity and Passport Service that the eyeborg is part of Neil’s body as a contentious ruling.

One of the things that makes the ruling significant, however, is that it seems to demonstrate the ambiguity we face in determining exactly what the eyeborg is ontologically.  It begs questions regarding political perceptions of the body.  Neil relates a story to the BBC in which three policemen attacked him at a demonstration because they thought he was filming them.  He tried to explain to them that he was not filming, but that he was ‘listening to colours’.  The police thought he was mocking them.  (See science, tech and culture weblog Boingboing for a picture he tweeted of the aftermath,) While I must admit that I can easily understand the policemen’s confusion, I’m more interested here in a ruling that words the eyeborg as an official body part.  What type of crime is an assault on the eyeborg?  I wonder if the case was ever made that the assault was not destruction of property, but grievous bodily harm.  If the eyeborg is defined as a body part, are the policemen’s actions akin to chopping off an index finger, or worse?

The public recognition of Neil’s cyborgian nature also gives insight into the definition of the term cyborg itself.  I sense a growing problem in attempts to find an etic reference to represent cyborgism.  Some musings have been written on this, and I do not wish to speak of them all here other than to say that attempts to pinpoint empirical cyborg identifiers leaves me wanting.  At its broadest, cyborg as a signifier refers to a relationship between organic and inorganic structures.  Some maintain that being cyborgian implies that one engages in this relationship on a more intimate level than the broad definition delineates, though intimacy itself is intensely value laden.  The physical and psychological boundaries that must be crossed are unclear.  Must the sacred border of skin be penetrated by technology, or must the technology exhibit a certain level of permanence?  Must the technology calculate, or must it be visible, or must it do something enhancing?  I have relatives with pacemakers and defibrillators surgically implanted into their chests.  The devices keep the heart beating, regulating the body’s electrical output, and pumping vital oxygen filled blood through the body.  The relationship is certainly one of intimacy, yet the machine–body hybridity is not enough for them to own a cyborg identity.  There is one perspective in defining cyborgism that appeals to me more than others.  That is the idea that technology must manipulate the senses in some novel way.  What would then set Neil’s eye piece apart from, say, a hearing aid?  Perhaps what a cyborg denotes is a shift in the way one perceives their environment, but perhaps it requires the shift to be distinct to normal human experience, a mechanical practice in alterity.  As someone pointed out to me, the only real difference they could see between the eyeborg and a hearing aid or ocular aid was a sensory shift between input and output, in this case, vision becomes sound. Kevin Warwick’s laboratory’s work on cybernetic sonar would work on similar grounds.  What faces the human as sound becomes sight.  The term cyborg, then, might have little to do with technology, but rather denote a re–evaluation of physical or epistemological and cognitive technique.  It also allows for a playful use of paradoxical language; “I’m listening to colour”, “I am watching the echo”.  It works also as a tool to manipulate the dimensions of human sensory scale.  Neil says he is working on listening to ultraviolet, Kevin Warwick has a PhD student who sees infrared.  This definition is perhaps more satisfying for me, though it remains open for heavy critique.

In any case, I sense the complexity in comprehending the novel identity.  I suspect that a polythetic definition of a cyborg is more prudent than an adherence to any particular definitive label.  Anthropologically, however, I question the point in creating an etic definition of a cyborg at all.  The category of being seems inherently emic.  I am a cyborg if I say I am, or perhaps, if I feel like one.  Maybe we know a cyborg when we see one.  The identity becomes a type of social je ne sais quoi that maintains a publically recognized authenticity.  This thought might be disconcerting to some.  It implies that cyborgism has no basis in technological reality, but is simply constructed vis a vis a set of fickle social and cultural value systems.  It is here that I think about aestheticism.

I must admit that in some ways, I cannot help but view Neil’s eyeborg as a novel art project.  I am hesitant to argue that this is its only emic engagement, and there are certainly arguments warning us of the dangers in aesthetic judgement.  Brenda Brasher, an ethicist at Tulane has written, “Whether conceived of as a liberating vision of human evolution where the cyborg sheds it human limitations–the senses of the body, the emotions of the heart, and the ideologies of the power elite–or as an undesirable fictive entity who serves as a counterpoint to the desirable traits of being human, the cyborgian self is not merely or exclusively a character of artistic fantasy” (Brasher 1996, 810).  Still, I often see the human use of technology in and on the body as a way of feeling the world.  In Camden Market here in London, for example, there is a subculture of self–proclaimed cyborgs, adorned in non–sensical prosthetics, listening to ‘cyber’ music, and shopping at ‘cyborg’ outlets where cashiers have metal implants in their body.  The culture demands a cyborgian feeling, that emotive relationship with technology that seeps into other cultural outlets; clothing, music, affect.  In turn, it demands an emotional response from those who view them.  I gather that most people in this subculture (I have known a few of them) are ‘pretending’, or acting as their cyborgian selves only temporally… but does it at all matter?

This of course does not distract from the validity of a cyborg identity, but it might be what shapes that identity.  Cyborgism as a form of aestheticism is anti–heretical.  It becomes less a manipulation of the body, or transgression of sacred bodily space, and more of visceral aesthetic experiment, a creative way to attempt emotional perspective.  Immanuel Kant, in his Critique of Judgement (1790), discusses the intellectual observations of the power of aesthetics.  Kant viewed judgements of beauty as a product of intellect, but also sense and emotion.  Neil Harbisson takes this aesthetic phenomenon to a beautifully new and strange place, but the phenomenon remains a quest for beauty nonetheless.  Neil does not hear a sound that cannot normally be heard, but he is able to create a cognitive and emotional response to colour through sound.  The technology is new, but the inherently human technique to me is ancient.  We are able, without requiring reflection, to look at a picture of the ocean and then hear the ocean.  The cyborg becomes defined as a phenomenological conduit in which technology can manipulate an affective reaction.  I wonder, then, if defining the cyborg in terms of therapy vs. enhancement might be a bit of a red–herring.  Certainly intense ethical dilemmas emerge in engaging with most technology, let alone one that redefines the human body.  Still, I see the art form of cyborgism devoid of any superhuman quality.  Neil Harbisson recently founded the Cyborg Foundation, where he aims to help humans become cyborgs.  I argue it is something of a mistake to conceive of this a just a centre for either enhancement or therapy, and indeed, it would be malevolent to suggest that it is akin to a tattoo parlour.  Rather, I suggest we shift our metaphors away from the manipulated body, and on to a centre for cyborg development as a school of art–technique.  I see it, for better or for worse, as conforming quite neatly into the human condition, a natural expression of creativity and emotion.  At the front of Neil’s personal webpage he writes “We aren’t white or black, we are orange”.  I like it.  There may be some irony in metaphorically linking the human–self to a colour that Harbisson has never really seen, but I don’t think so, after all, that is what he hears us to be.

Aaron Parkhurst is a PhD Candidate in Medical Anthropology at UCL.  His research includes humanity’s struggles with modernity and changing perceptions of the ‘self’. He can be contacted on this email address.

––––––

References:

http://boingboing.net/2012/02/16/colorblind-painters-wearable.html

BBC News Online, “The man who hears colour”, BBC News, 15th February 2012, http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-16681630

Brasher, B. “Thoughts on the status of the cyborg: on technological socialization and its link to the religious function of popular culture” in Journal of the American Academy of Religion 64, 1996: 809–30.

Neil Harbisson’s website: www.harbisson.com

• Enhancement

There have been 0 replies to this Article. + Post your comment here.