Of AIDS, Cyborgs, and Other Indiscretions: Resurfacing the Body in the Postmodern

Fin-de-Siècle Fictions, 1890s-1990s

“…This was a very similar perception to the image of the human body offered by nonlinear dynamics, as a Prigoginean 'dissipative structure', a multi-levelled system which maintains itself by its networking with the environment. And 'the networking of bodies has been prominent in the representations of and discourse about AIDS in the U.S.' (Fraiberg 1991). Allison Fraiberg has in mind official public statements such as the one made back in 1987 by the Secretary of Health and Human Services, Dr. Otis R. Bown: 'So remember when a person has sex, they're not just having it with that partner, they're having it with everybody that partner had it with for the past ten years ' (cited in Sontag 1991: 161).…”

“…And, of course, these systems interpenetrate as networks of social relations emerge. (Fraiberg 1991) It is to this extent that AIDS emerged as 'one of the dystopian harbingers of the global village' (Sontag 1991: 181), an epidemic in a 'fragile world' where 'some small social change might push the button that instigates viral Armageddon' (Schell 1997: 112). For Porush, retroviruses like HIV are 'cyborg events' insofar as they are 'the product of orgiastic physiological feedback mechanisms between the world and the worldbody, which might continue to spawn these transcription reversals between RNA and DNA because we have achieved some new order of Prigoginesque complexity' (1991b).…”

“…This condition was registered as a tragedy in a series that staged the conflicts of a matriarchal 'family' against the monstrous matriarchy of the Borg during its efforts to return back to the patriarchal Federation. The show was therefore staging a return to the 'family', that 'monolithic and legally binding category' (Watney 1991: 86) that mainstream representatives were opposing to 'risk groups' in public statements on the AIDS epidemic, thus drawing 'on newly delineated boundaries; a revised "us/ them" dichotomy' (Fraiberg 1991) denying the importance of global networks for the outbreak of the epidemic. This tendency to re-establish boundaries and hierarchies was enacted at a global level in the theories of origin circulating in the US that were identifying the source of the virus in Africa, or others in Africa, Europe and the USSR suggesting that the virus was sent to Africa from the US in order to decrease birth rates.…”

We Are Borg: Cyborgs and the Subject of Communication

“…Since the publication of Haraway's essay, the cyborg has materialized in a number of seemingly unrelated fields, e.g., feminism (Stabile, 1994;Howell, 1995;Sandoval, 1995;Balsamo, 1996), film studies (Pask, 1995;Rushing & Frentz, 1995;Springer, 1996;Larson, 1997;Bukatman, 1997), environmental studies (Bennet, 1993), literary criticism (Brown, 1996;Lindberg, 1996;Clayton, 1996;Williams, 1998), composition (Winkelmann, 1995), philosophy and religion (Taylor, 1993;Driscoll, 1995;Brasher, 1996;Davis, 1998), interdisciplinary studies (Shanti, 1993;Porush, 1994;Biro, 1994) science fiction studies (Dunn & Erlich, 1982;Casimir, 1994;Harper, 1995;Davidson, 1996;Siivonen, 1996), anthropology (Downey, Dumit, & Williams, 1995;Downey, 1995;Dumit, 1995;Williams, 1995;Hess, 1995;Escobar, 1996), sociology and cultural studies (Featherstone & Burrows, 1997;Frailberg, 1993), and computer-mediated communication and information technology (Taylor & Saarinen, 1994;Stone, 1995;Turkle, 1995;Kramarae, 1995;Mitchell, 1995;Dery, 1996;…”

Introduction: Philosophy and Politics After COVID-19

“…As I show in Chapter 2, Baudrillard turns to AIDS as a symbol of our liberation from all traditional modes of cultural filtering. 4 He thus uses this medical condition as a metaphor for contemporary life, and one of the effects of this rhetoric is that the distinction between biology and culture breaks down. His implicit argument is that as we liberate ourselves from past social restraints, we also liberate ourselves from meaning itself.…”