| The cyborg is the prevalent metaphor of human hybridization with technology and the evolving transformation of human subjectivity in contemporary times. Using Louis Althusser's subjectivity model, this dissertation presents Mary Shelley's Frankenstein as the first cyborg text and the beginning of character paradigms for the cyborg-maker and cyborg. These paradigms provide a critical scale by which cyborg representations can be placed into an evolving continuum spanning from 1921 to the 2001. Along with Frankenstein (1818), other primary texts covered in depth include Karel Capec's R.U.R. (1921), Isaac Asimov's I, Robot (1941) and Bicentennial Man (1974), Philip K. Dick's Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep (1968), Bryan Forbes' film The Stepford Wives (1975), James Cameron's Terminator films (1983 and 1991), and Paul Verhoeven's RoboCop (1985). In addition to these and other films and literature, the work of performance artists Orlan and Stelarc are discussed in depth as examples of the most provocative and avant garde thinking in cultural cyborgism.; Through the evolution of cyborg representations, our cultural artifacts have demonstrated a shift from cyborgs seeking human subjectivity, to cyborgs replacing and erasing human subjectivity, to humans seeking cyborg subjectivity, to the abolition of unified subjectivity all together, be it cyborg or human. This last stage is called distributed consciousness and reflects the disembodied subjectivity foreseen in films such as the Wachowski brothers' The Matrix (1999), and David Cronenberg's eXistenZ (2000). Ultimately, this dissertation contextualizes the cyborgian subjectivity shift as both a reflection of the postmodern critique of late capitalism and as an example of structural tragedy. For within the very texts that explore the intricacies of posthuman life, there lies an unyielding mournful expression of anxiety over the humanity lost in the transformation. Northrup Frye's Anatomy of Criticism provides the structural map by which the mournful elements of the cyborg texts are located, analyzed, and read as part of a collective coming to terms with human hybridization. |
