Weiner’s Fear of Castration
One of the most fascinating potions of How We Became Posthuman deals with the father of modern cybernetics, Norbert Wiener. Because so much of our current understanding of cyborgs is based in his work, N. Katherine Hayles takes the reader through a large chunk of his life and theories: how we came right up to the very edge of crossing over into a definition that would cross gender boundaries, of cyborgs reaching through and between social constructions of bodies, but couldn’t quite make it across himself. Part of the reason, explains Hayles, is the very epistemology that Wiener worked under — something that lead to our current state, but was ultimately flawed.
See, Wiener believed in a probabilistic universe. One in which there was a control of sorts for those who could only divine the patterns and obscure causality chains.
Noise (mapped to randomness in the Hayles’ pattern-randomness continuum) was seen as the ultimate death of a closed system. Once it has reached its entropic end, past the threshold where all patterns failed, there was nothing left. For Wiener, understanding the range of noise, of mapping various formula and functions to combat it, was the utmost goal. It was through these that we might could to understand information and how the universe worked: “the more information there is, the less entropy; the more entropy is present, the less information” (102).
Information, then, was the signal that there was complexity in the universe. It becomes a kind of energy, and as Hayles leads into, this means that it follows the same rules of all other kinds of energy: the laws of thermodynamics. By making this link, though, information (patterns) could be more easily written out in a mathematical way. It could be more easily computed. And it was along these lines that Wiener tried to bridge the two worlds of science and the humanities too.
Writing about mathematics, Wiener called it that “‘which most of see as the most factual of all sciences constitutes the most colossal metaphor imaginable, and must be judged, aesthetically as well as intellectually, in terms of the success of this metaphor'” (93). Math, in words, was just another language. However, it was one in which the metaphors were not thought of as such. Its relations were thought of as pure and totally objective, not as slippage and loose relations between signifiers.
For as much as Wiener was able to lead the charge to use cybernetics as a way to reach different disciplines, of trying to cross into various fields and unite them in directly connecting math and metaphors, he wasn’t ready to think about bodies being penetrated, though. Not at all. In what Hayles writes as the “cybernetics of the subject and the subject of the cybernetics interpenetrate,” both the user and the machine intersect (108). If the body of the cyborg can be augmented, it can also be changed. Something that Wiener understood — and feared.
Hayles describes this fear as the potential to “annihilate the liberal subject as the locus of control” (110). This lose of control was not just in the sense of bodies as whole, either. It had a very specific sexual anxiety attached to it: male castration. By decoupling the idea that bodies were a single entity, Wiener was able to make the case, just as the universe is composed of similar, equal parts, so too is a body. However, this is also deeply problematic for social constructions like gender that dependent on a foundations of fundamental differences.
By thinking of cyborgs in a Haraway sense, of both physical and symbol, we can cross the interpersonal boundary. If bodies don’t really matter, neither does a physicality based social system. However, this was a bridge too far for Wiener. As Hayles notes, he saw a cyborg in the mirror in front of him and looked away. The threat of dismantling even a little masculinity was too much and, as Hayles tracks through his works as well, this anxiety manifested in the theme of a savage in which Wiener would use as part of examples and then safety tuck away again afterword.
In summarizing this view, Hayles writes that “Not only sex but the sex organs themselves disappear in this construction” (111). The fear of castration was too much for Wiener and he pulled out from taking the steps that future feminists following him and his work would: cyborgs as bodily disruptive, as humans being under the same subjectivity they sought to bring to their created machines. That the erotic anxiety was acceptable and not to be feared as the end of selfhood.
Comments:
Sherie’s “The Cool Kids Pt. II” (Comment)
More interesting details about the collision of appropriation, both culturally and digitally, in its deployment and usage. Enjoyed the summary of the section on juxtaposition too. Always like a good shout-out to McLuhan.
Watched the video “Aspirational” (liked it; it’s far more real than comedy in my experience, though) and, of course, enjoyed seeing writing and comments discussing Remediation too. I liked the reminder about Bolter and Gruslin’s AT and THROUGH (and Brooke’s additional FROM) as well.
As a child of the 80s, I primarily recall filmed depictions of cyborgs as created to disrupt or destroy humanity once the machines became selfaware. I see this idea echoed in your Posthuman statement which claims “cyborgs as bodily disruptive, as humans being under the same subjectivity they sought to bring to their created machines.” There is fear (or at least suspicion) that society will fall if we become too dependent on machines for help. Your post reminds me of peppers (seemingly-suburban or rural families who store goods and survival tools in case the government’s power grid is attacked. While prepping in this sense is not in response to the fictional Skynet, it is still cultivated by a similar fear that we will lose our humanity as a result of our electronic prowess