Media-con: convergence, convolution and control.

Panoptics and the technological gaze.

Jaimie Smith-Windsor’s article The Cyborg Mother: A Breached Boundary reads like part journal and part theoretical analysis. She incorporates her experience of giving pre-mature birth to her daughter into a parallel with Cyborg theory. The incubator that keeps her baby alive becomes a physical and ideological surrogate. Smith-Windsor’s fears come true when she realizes that “the interface is the matriarch of cyborg culture”, and that it has now impregnated itself into her pre-mature daughter. Her article explores Foucault‘s notion of the ‘panopticon‘ and that becoming a cyborg means “internalizing the panopticon”. (p.283) Becoming both the invisible watcher and the subject being watched — like a closed circuit — even after the machine is turned off, “cyborg life continues to occupy the human condition through consciousness, subconsciousness, and perception.” (p.283) This same idea pervades Terminator:  The Sarah Connor Chronicles (2008), as the mother and son must constantly be on the run from the machines.

They do however have the aid of a cyborg, sent from the future, to help them run. The mother-son relationship has a cyborg intermediary than can provide as much, to the young John, as the real mother. This threat of replacement is felt as a ‘breached boundary’ in Jamie Smith-Windsor’s article, as she underscores the impossibility of ‘being’ outside of technologie’s invisible grip. She brings up an important issue about privilege and, as Jaques Derrida calls the ‘logocentric moment’, how “where one technology of knowing is priviliged over another, and infinite other histories of being are forgotten.” (p.282) This point clarifies how “identity is bound to the logocentric privileging of the dominant discourse”, which is impregnated with a panoptical-technological-gaze, and makes it impossible for difference or divergence.

Returning to the introductory paragraph, after getting through her arguments, had me asking myself if her challenge of ‘rebelling against myself or the technologies of myself to discover new ways of being’, held much weight. I would not go so far as becoming a ‘country-bumpkin’ or menonite but how different would my life be without technology? Or maybe less frequency or less access during the week? Would it chase me down like a Terminator and try to stop me from stopping? Or more-likely that other people with their ‘panoptical gaze’ would be surrogates for the Terminator and my friends and family would look down at me in my underprivileged existence and question me. This kind of experiment might be a good point to start off with, in my post Film-4002 blogging.

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