Cyborg Urbanization: Complexity and Monstrosity in the Contemporary City
2005; Wiley; Volume: 29; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1111/j.1468-2427.2005.00568.x
ISSN1468-2427
Autores Tópico(s)Geographies of human-animal interactions
ResumoShe referred to the high-rise as if it were some kind of huge animate presence, brooding over them and keeping a magisterial eye on the events taking place. There was something in this feeling — the elevators pumping up and down the long shafts resembled pistons in the chamber of a heart. The residents moving along the corridors were the cells in a network of arteries, the lights in their apartments the neurones of a brain (J.G. Ballard, 1975: 40). Now, the boundaries between the organic and the inorganic, blurred by cybernetic and bio-technologies, seem less sharp; the body, itself invaded and re-shaped by technology, invades and permeates the space outside, even as this space takes on dimensions that themselves confuse the inner and the outer, visually, mentally and physically (Anthony Vidler, 1990: 37–8). The body-territory [corpo-territorio] poses a problematic form of corporeal identity that in becoming ever more routinized has tended to dissolve the distinctions that formerly existed between the organic and the inorganic (Tiziana Villani, 1995: 118). As she tentatively begins to play the piano, the replicant, named Rachel, recalls that she once had lessons but cannot be sure whether these memories are her own or simply the implanted memories of someone else. In this poignant scene in Ridley Scott's Blade Runner (1982) we explore the possibility that human identities might be artificially created in order to produce advanced androids whose intelligence and sensitivity is comparable with that of their human creators. The figure of the cyborg, as represented in science fiction cinema, is not an automaton or robot but a sophisticated creation that seems to simultaneously extend but also threaten our understanding of what it means to be human. If we were to locate the cyborg as an idea, we could say that it is clearly linked to fantastical combinations of bodies and machines but is nonetheless a way of thinking about the world. It is, in other words, an ontological strategy for extending the limits to human knowledge as well as an apposite means of describing those phenomena that appear to reside outside conventional frameworks of understanding. If a cyborgian sensibility is explored within the context of the contemporary city, we find that it has developed out of several interconnecting strands of thought as a trope of critical reflection which uncovers a series of anomalies, fractures and tensions lurking within dominant modes of urban and architectural thinking. Since the early 1960s the potential applications of the cyborg concept have proliferated to include developments such as whole organism cloning, in vitro fertilization, gene sequencing, advanced prosthetics and other sophisticated medical technologies. In tandem with these technological manifestations, the imaginative field of the cyborg has expanded through literature, cinema and the fantasy spaces of contemporary culture.1 It is since the mid-1980s, however, that the idea of the cyborg has been associated with a more densely argued series of theoretical applications as a means to explore the interface between technology and the body. The key intervention here is Donna Haraway's article entitled 'A Cyborg Manifesto', first published in the Socialist Review in 1985, and later included in her influential collection of essays Simians, Cyborgs and Women where she writes in her introduction (1991a: 1): A cyborg is a hybrid creature, composed of organism and machine. But, cyborgs are compounded of special kinds of machines and special kinds of organisms appropriate to the late twentieth century. Cyborgs are post-Second World War hybrid entities made of, first, ourselves and other organic creatures in our unchosen "high-technological" guise as information systems, texts, and ergonomically controlled labouring, desiring, and reproducing systems. The second essential ingredient in cyborgs is machines in their guise, also, as communications systems, texts, and self-acting, ergonomically designed apparatuses. This succinct and revealing definition reminds us that the idea of the cyborg, as originally elaborated by Haraway, is at root a political as well as an intellectual project, an idea which originated in and from the 'belly of the monster' (1991a: 4), that nexus of political and economic entanglements that we might term the 'first world' in distinction to the proliferating spaces of marginality that lie beyond.2 Since its inception as a critical intellectual concept in the 1980s the cyborg metaphor has been deployed to challenge disembodied, dualistic, masculinist and teleological bodies of knowledge. It has infused science and technology studies with feminist epistemological strategies. It has opened up new possibilities for the understanding of relations between nature and culture. And it has facilitated greater sensitivity towards social and spatial complexity through its emphasis on 'situated knowledges'. The idea of the cyborg shares an affinity with related concepts such as 'cyberspace', 'cybernetics' and 'cyberpunk'. Yet the contemporary use of the term 'cyborg' is different from these virtual, analytical and fictional constructs because it is grounded in the living and breathing flesh of the human body. Whilst the 'cyber-' metaphor has tended to be associated with various forms of virtuality, the idea of the cyborg is closely linked with the corporeal experience of space.3 In this sense the cyborg can be read as an alternative way of conceptualizing the growth and development of cities that serves to destabilize the pervasive narratives of dematerialization, spatial malleability and virtualization. The underlying materiality of the cyborg metaphor has acquired heightened significance now that the earlier polarity between virtual space and 'meat space' articulated in the first wave of cyber literature is losing its conceptual utility and now that the very idea of 'virtual reality' is itself imploding as it becomes either relocated in the context of a heightened dimension of the real (see, for example, Žižek, 2002) or simply derided as an inherently oxymoronic formulation (see Grosz, 2001).4 The emphasis of the cyborg on the material interface between the body and the city is perhaps most strikingly manifested in the physical infrastructure that links the human body to vast technological networks. If we understand the cyborg to be a cybernetic creation, a hybrid of machine and organism, then urban infrastructures can be conceptualized as a series of interconnecting life-support systems (see Swyngedouw, 1996; Marras, 1999; Gandy, 2002; Mitchell, 2003). The modern home, for example, has become a complex exoskeleton for the human body with its provision of water, warmth, light and other essential needs. The home can be conceived as 'prosthesis and prophylactic' in which modernist distinctions between nature and culture, and between the organic and the inorganic, become blurred (Vidler, 1990: 37). And beyond the boundaries of the home itself we find a vast interlinked system of networks, pipes and wires that enable the modern city to function. These interstitial spaces of connectivity within individual buildings extend through urban space to produce a multi-layered structure of extraordinary complexity and utility. The figure of the cyborg is at root a spatial metaphor. But how does the idea of the cyborg intersect with spatial theory? In what ways does the cyborg reinforce or contradict other emerging strands of urban thought that also emphasize urban complexity and hybridity? Has the epistemological subtlety and political prescience of the cyborg, as originally formulated in the 1980s, been realized in practice or simply been diffused through the term's widening usage? And should we ultimately reject the idea of the cyborg as an anachronism derived from cold war science and the first generation of twentieth-century cyberpunk culture? In the rest of this article I will try to address these issues through an exploration of the somewhat haphazard presence of the cyborg in contemporary urban discourse. I will focus in particular on the example of urban infrastructure as a concrete manifestation of the cyborg idea in order to explore different facets of the relationship between the city, the body and the human subject. My aim is not to foreclose discussions surrounding the 'cyborg city' but to open up a series of dialogues in order to explore contemporary thinking around these questions. One of the principal difficulties with delineating the cyborg city as a clearly defined entity is derived from the entanglement of the cyborg idea with a variety of urban metaphors ranging from organicist conceptions of the nineteenth-century city to 'neo-organicist' representations of the post-industrial metropolis. In its classic nineteenth-century form the organicist conception of the city emerged out of a functional analogy, originating within the medical sciences, wherein spatial differentiation corresponded with a distinctive arrangement of human organs. We find that Kantian notions of the self-organizational characteristics of animate matter were combined with new insights into the human vascular and arterial system and an emerging circulatory emphasis within the nascent science of political economy. In recent years, however, the organicist emphasis on the city as an integrated body with identifiable organs, which emerged in response to the nineteenth-century industrial city, has been increasingly displaced by the idea of urban space as a prosthetic extension to the human body. The body-city problematic has been reconceptualized in the context of post-Cartesian and post-positivist modes of thinking. The emphasis on the city as a self-contained body or machine has been challenged by a hybridized conception of space as a system of technological devices that enhances human productive and imaginative capabilities. The cyborg metaphor not only reworks the metabolic preoccupations of the nineteenth-century industrial city but also extends to a contemporary body of ideas that we can term 'neo-organicist' on account of the deployment of biophysical metaphors for the interpretation of social and spatial complexity. In the neo-organicist city we encounter a shift of emphasis away from an anatomical conception of space as an assemblage of individual organs towards a neurological reading of space as a diffuse and interconnected realm of human interaction. The film maker Michael Burke, for example, director of Cyborg City (1999), describes how beneath the 'glass and concrete' of the future city there will be a 'humming mass of technology' acting as a central nervous system, 'constantly monitoring and controlling both its own functions and those of its citizens' (Burke, 1998).5 The mechanical and hierarchical model of the relationship between the body and the city has been supplanted by a more complex and non-linear pattern of urban development in response to the spread of new information technologies (see Gille, 1986; Rabinbach, 1990; Akira, 2001). The organicist city of the modern era was founded on a clear separation between mind and body that enabled the city to be conceptualized as a coherent entity to be acted upon, disciplined, regulated and shaped according to human will. The emergence of the neo-organicist city, in contrast, is founded on the blurring of boundaries rather than their repeated delineation. At the same time, however, there remain important continuities between the kind of machine-based metaphors associated with the early twentieth-century futurism of figures such as Mario Chiattone, Filippo Tommaso Marinetti and Antoniono Sant'Elia and the elaborate computer-based metaphors deployed in the contemporary city (see Villani, 1995; Boyer, 1996; Schaub, 1998). Other significant continuities include, for example, the avant-garde bricolage of early cinema and the surrealist bodies depicted in the art of Hans Bellmer, Francis Picabia and other responses to 'a sterile and over rationalised technological realism' (Vidler, 1990: 42).6 These interconnecting strands between cultural modernism and the emergence of the cyborg metaphor are significant because they underlie the centrality of corporeal metaphors for the critical interpretation of urban form. The current emphasis on corporeal and neurological analogies in the neo-organicist literature owes more to earlier developments than is widely acknowledged. We can detect two principal dimensions to contemporary neo-organicist urban thought. A first strand, rooted in the bio-physical sciences, perceives the city to be a special kind of complex, yet intricately ordered system. This homeostatic perspective, which is inflected by ecological thinking and recent developments in evolutionary biology, has diffused through parts of the architectural literature and is only tangentially linked with the epistemological challenge of cyborg theory.7 A second and more intellectually significant development is represented by the convergence of ideas surrounding the 'thinking space' of the city and the indeterminacy of spatial forms. If the body-city nexus is conceptualized as a thinking machine then the analytical focus shifts towards the identification of those critical networks or 'neurones' that sustain the relationship between the body and the city (Kurokawa, 2001a). Though this dimension to the neo-organicist perspective shares important continuities with the technological preoccupations of early twentieth-century modernism, it extends its conceptual purview into different aspects of cultural modernism. The influential speculations of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, for example, develop Antonin Artaud's conception of the 'body without organs' to produce a philosophy of spatial complexity quite different from that associated with dominant modernist traditions (Deleuze and Guattari, 1986; 1987; Rajchman, 2000; Uno, 2001). Their philosophical challenge is to perceive space in the absence of any previously existent categories, hierarchies or systems as a form of 'anarchic non-identical proliferation' (Luckhurst, 1997: 128). The organic metaphor of the 'rhizome' is deployed in distinction to 'arborescent' conceptions of cities as hierarchical structures (Teysott, 1990; Akira, 2001; Kurokawa, 2001a). In addition to this emphasis on non-hierarchical structures of difference Deleuze and Guattari's conception of concrete space also seeks to incorporate the imaginary, libidinous and oneiric realms of human experience. From their 'neo-vitalist' perspective, which builds on the philosophical ideas of Henri Bergson, the virtual realm is not simply a mimesis or reflection of physical reality but an independent domain that generates new kinds of spaces and ideas. The political significance of the virtual realm lies in its experimental and emergent role as part of an envisioned space that has yet to be realized within the taken-for-granted realm of concrete reality (Boundas, 1996; Massumi, 2001). The role of the diagram or 'abstract machine' takes on special significance in this context as an attempt to give visual expression to new models of reality.8 In the case of architecture, for example, there has been an intense dialogue between developments in building design and the speculative possibilities engendered by computer-aided simulations so that 'physical space increasingly resembles cyberspace' (Mitchell, 2003: 197). Some architectural practices have deployed so-called 'genetic algorithms' in order to generate a form of 'in vitro' architecture which derives its inspiration from nature yet remains autonomous from it as a purely digitized space of imaginative exploration (see Chu, 2002; De Landa, 2002).9 Examples of architectural practice inflected by post-structuralist ideas which move beyond purely 'in vitro' speculations to fully realized projects include the work of Peter Eisenman, Frank Gehry and Bernard Tschumi, where sophisticated combinations of form, structure and materials have been achieved, which are quite at odds with modernist conceptions of architectural form. A conceptual synthesis can be discerned in some of the recent literature between post-structuralist philosophies of space and Latourian conceptions of actor-network theory to produce a new kind of urban theorization which eschews the meta-narratives associated with neo-Marxian approaches. Building on the insights of Deleuze and Guattari these approaches have sought to remove all the extrinsic or foundational aspects to urban theory and pare analysis down to the movements and interactions that constitute 'the city' as a particular kind of spatial form or activity that is independent of conventional accounts of scale, structure or order.10 The brain or 'thinking space' of the city persists yet is dispersed through innumerable nodes and networks in contrast with the embodied cyborg citizen to be found in the more technophile literature. We can trace these developments back to the emerging critique of architectural modernism in the 1970s and 1980s that increasingly drew on the theoretical ontologies of post-structuralism in order to advance a radically unplanned built form.11 From this perspective the role of 'chaos', for example, takes on a very different significance from that associated with the modernist city and is perceived as a field of evolutionary and radical experimentation. Chaos is no longer seen as an anomalous dimension to the urban experience to be problematized or excluded from analysis but a rich vein of social and spatial interaction through which we may perceive signs of alternative or hitherto overlooked urban forms. Chaos may also be characterized as a more sophisticated, resilient and adaptable form of order as Rem Koolhaas has suggested with respect to the dynamics of West African urbanism (Koolhaas et al., 2001; Koolhaas, 2002). The theoretical novelty of such a perspective sits sharply at odds, however, with the capacity for what one might term 'avant-garde urbanism' to actually explicate any substantial dimensions to urban change (see, for example, Rauterberg, 2002; Gandy, 2004b). We can detect within urban and architectural discourse an emerging counter current to post-structuralist and avant-garde urbanism led by a combination of formal, technical and political critiques (see Frampton, 1996; van Berkel and Bos, 1998). Though the post-structuralism of Deleuze and Guattari seeks to make explicit linkages between the 'real' and the 'virtual', and is in this respect a significant advance on the flattening and one-dimensional simulacra of Jean Baudrillard, there is a persistent difficulty in articulating any kind of cogent political critique of the cyborg city. The emphasis on the fluid characteristics of urban space risks overlooking the particular combinations of fixed capital and human expertise that enable specific nodes within the global urban system to play enhanced roles in the arena of cultural and economic production. The disavowal of structure hampers the evaluation of the theoretical and practical significance of these insights despite the potentially fertile coalescence between Deleuzian post-structuralism and a cyborg sensibility towards the mutual entanglement of the real and the virtual. We are left with an ironic continuity between the functionalist reading of the industrial city and a 'neo-organicist' preoccupation with the design of space that resides quite comfortably alongside reworked formalist idioms in architectural criticism. The emerging depiction of the human-machine interface as a technological monstrosity is strongly associated with nineteenth-century romanticism: anxieties over uncontrollable science and technology, for example, form part of a long-standing counter discourse to modernist teleologies of technological progress (Clayton, 1996; Tsouvalis, 2003). In recent years, however, the trope of technological monsters has tended to divide between a Haraway-Latour axis of new affinities towards excluded others on the one hand, and the persistence of fears towards technology and its 'malevolent autonomy' on the other hand (Waldby, 2002: 28). The appearance of the cyborg has engendered a new wave of fear and trepidation towards the invasion of the body by strange technologies that threaten to eliminate or overwhelm the human subject. In the writings of Paul Virilio, for example, we move beyond the romantic and Heideggerian critique of technology towards a political economy of technology and its intersection with the human body. Virilio sees the colonization of the body by new technologies as a 'revolution of transplantations' that marks the critical 'third wave' of modernity following the earlier revolutions in transportation and communications technologies (Virilio, 1997: 6). Virilio charts the advance of a 'neo-eugenics' in which the power of military-scientific imperialism leads towards an 'endo-colonization' of the human body itself so that we no longer talk of the body in the city but of the 'city in the body' (see Virilio, 1995; 1997). The cyborg figure becomes a symbol for the militarization of society: we are no longer dealing with a cold war astronaut but with the technologically enhanced soldier of the twenty-first century peering around the corner of buildings in defence of prosperous nations and their corporate sponsors.12 The hygienist discourses of the past have been radically extended by new technologies of surveillance and control in order to construct the cordons sanitaires of the twenty-first century. New defensive structures have developed that combine long-standing mechanisms of social exclusion such as housing markets with enhanced forms of social control through a mix of architectural, ideological and intelligence-gathering processes. The growing significance of urban warfare in particular is now leading towards military strategies which specifically target the destruction of essential technological networks such as water and power in order to subdue civilian populations and eradicate sources of political resistance (Graham, 2003; 2004). A deliberate process of decoupling modern societies from urban technological networks or 'decyborgization' to use Timothy Luke's (1996) expression is reducing marginalized communities to a state of biological subsistence so that they are no longer political subjects but mere inhabitants struggling for existence (see also Agamben, 1998; Bauman, 2004). Through a process of deliberate disenfranchisement from modernity whole societies face the prospect of annihilation through a combination of disease, impoverishment and overt acts of violence. Ranged against the more fearful readings of technology we can discern an emphasis on the cyborg as a means of becoming 'post human' in order to liberate the human body from the illusory boundaries of the autonomous self.13 In the work of William J. Mitchell, for example, we can trace a lineage from 'Vitruvian man', through the phenomenological experience of space, to the contemporary networked urban citizen as 'a spatially extended cyborg' (Mitchell, 2003: 39). 'For millennia', writes Mitchell (1998: 173), 'architects have been concerned with the skin-bounded body and its immediate sensory environment . . . now they must contemplate electronically augmented, reconfigurable, virtual bodies that can sense and act at a distance but that also remain partially anchored in their immediate surroundings'. In this sense Mitchell builds on the technologically inflected historicism of earlier writers such as Reyner Banham, Sigfreid Giedion and Pierre Naville who depicted modernity as a series of revolutionary technical innovations. Focusing on wireless infrastructures Mitchell explores the extraordinary technological potentialities of the cyber city and the increasing interaction of digital code with virtually every sphere of human activity (Mitchell, 2003). Yet this is a strangely undifferentiated future in which the polarities and exclusions of space are largely overlooked. Mitchell (2003: 5) claims, for example, that we are witnessing 'the shift from a world structured by boundaries and enclosures to a world dominated, at every scale, by connections, networks, and flows' but he ignores the devastating disparities between the mobility of capital and labour that condemn much of humanity to economic serfdom. In the final instance his perspective is so heavily driven by technological change that it begins to assume the role of an independent variable in his analysis. The blurring of boundaries between the body and the city raises complexities in relation to our understanding of the human subject and the changing characteristics of human agency. An extended conception of human agency would include, for instance, the role of biophysical processes and socio-cultural technological systems that impact upon the social production of space. Bruno Latour, for example, has emphasized different scales of analysis to allow the extension of our conception of agency to include those objects, forms, structures and non-human elements that have been systematically excluded from both positivist and materialist epistemological traditions (Latour, 1993; 2004).14 Whereas the work of Haraway has tended to emphasize the affinities between human and non-human nature the practical import of Latour has been the mapping or delineation of 'cascading micro-decisions' linking between different kinds of networks or structures (Zitouni, 2004). The cyborg can be conceived in a Latourian sense as both a new kind of social interaction with space but also a disordered concept to be conceived in opposition to the purified realm of modernist urban thought. Yet a Latourian public realm, with its hybridized conceptions of agency, is quite different from that envisaged within Habermasian philosophical traditions because of the radical extension of human agency to encompass those technical and organizational systems which the Frankfurt School philosophers sought to specifically exclude from the realm of ethical and political judgment. The concept of hybridity also entails its own spatiality, its own geometries of power between its constituent elements. The idea of the cyborg as a hybrid can be conceived as a problematic re-inscription of technical discourses derived from core locales or some overarching teleological template for urban change but it can also entail a reverse flow of ideas and developments from the margin to the centre. The complexities of colonial and post-colonial urbanism, for example, can be explored in terms of locally specific combinations of materials, practices and ideas drawn from disparate contexts (see, for example, Gabilondo, 1995; King, 1995; Hall, 2003). The cyborg metaphor can be used in this sense as an explicit recognition of the limits to formalist or teleological architectural discourses rooted in purified and neatly demarcated conceptions of cultural change. Following Latour's admonition that we have never been modern, we could argue that we have always led a cyborg existence since virtually every human endeavour has involved a combination of disparate cultural and technological skills ranging from the origins of language to the latest developments in materials science. But if we abandon any historical or geographical specificity to the cyborg idea we risk diluting its analytical utility as a means to engage with the cultural and technological complexity of the contemporary city. The complexities of human agency in the cyborg city point to the intersection between technological change and the reformulation of the public sphere inherited from the industrial city. But can the cyborg idea help us to understand the changing dynamics of infrastructure provision in relation to a digitized or diffuse conception of the public realm? If the interactions between human and synthetic sentience have eroded the idea that 'conscious agency is the essence of human identity' (Hayles, 1999a: 288) then this contradicts many of the insights of cultural history that have focused quite specifically on the co-evolution of material realities and systems of cultural meaning. The arguments made by Alain Corbin (1986), for example, over the evolution of olfactory perception locate these changes precisely within the context of a more individuated experience of modernity within which communal experiences begin to acquire a different set of meanings. What Catherine Hayles and the other 'post-human' theorists are in a sense suggesting is that new forms of 'distributed cognition' are creating a more integrated rather than individuated system of sensory perception that directly challenges the established trajectory of modern consciousness and experience. Post-human political discourse is grounded within the context of the decline of meta-narratives, the erosion of the public realm and the radical indeterminacy of the human subject. If the 'autonomous self' can be regarded as an illusory and highly restricted (socially and historically) realm of human experience, we are still left with the uncertainty of delineating the characteristics of the human subject in a cyborg society (Callard, 1998; Hayles, 1999a: 286). If the body-city interface is conceptualized as a non-Cartesian space, then the distinction between mind and body and between the material and the virtual becomes extensively blurred. But what happens when the human subject is increasingly merged with the fabric of the city itself? Whilst it is easy to accept that our hybridized interactions with space involve a greater role for 'silicon, copper and magnetic subsystems' (Mitchell, 2003: 168) it is much harder to conceive of ethical judgements as a digitized process of remote interactions with not only other humans but also non-human machines and networks. The physicist Michio Kaku, for example, describes a world emerging between 2020 an
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