Broadband Umbilical Cords
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“You’re a thing. A construct. They grew you in a fucking lab.”
“But only God can make a tree.”
Artist's Conception of Jaimie Smith-Windsor's Kid
Your context for the week: Jaime Smith-Windsor’s “The Cyborg Mother: A Breached Boundary
We’re going to look at a piece that comes from the opposite polarity of Donna Haraway’s article from last week. Haraway was interested in the cyborg as a metaphor, a springboard to provocative suggestion. Smith-Windsor, by comparison, is concerned with literal technology. She brings its impact home, would bring it closer than home, to her very bosom if she could, were it not for the obstructing bramble of plastic and wires. Haraway was useful in terms of distancing ourselves from a knee-jerk association of the term “cyborg” with projects like Kevin Warwick‘s (I’m pretty sure this guy will accidentally invent SkyNet by the way); our understanding of the word is, after all, heavily mediated by the bombastic paranoia of sci-fi action flicks and ’80s thrash metal (okay, maybe that’s just a reflection of my teen years.)
With our palette somewhat cleansed, then, we may be more receptive to a comparatively mundane, everyday instance of the modern cyborg. Certainly we’ve all seen rose-tinted visions of impossibly tiny preemie babies resting comfortably in their high-tech incubators (usually accompanied by some kind of emotive post-rock a la Sigur Ros’ Staralfur or anything by Explosions in the Sky), but we seldom pause to consider the implications of this particular intersection between humans and technology. It’s all soft focus and chiming chords.
Not so here, as anyone who has read the piece can attest. It’s a strange mix between deeply personal, involving and unflinchingly graphic “diary” excerpts and cool, detached interrogation of the philosophical implications of the process. Admittedly, it’s not terribly difficult to defamiliarize something few of us have put much thought into, but that’s sorta the point. Even (and perhaps especially) essential, lifesaving procedures like mechanically simulated wombs constitute an invasion of the organic body. Smith-Windsor, taking something of a psychoanalytic view of the development of the psyche, suggests that a baby who spends its final trimester in an artificial environment will have a different innate relationship to its mother. This seems to suggest that the bond between an infant and its mother is the result of some type of hardwired imprinting that allows the child to recognize the body which birthed it.
“The human condition becomes the medium itself. The cyborg consciousness becomes, like the clear glass of the incubator, an invisible interface through which everything is mediated – the environment, the experience of living, the means to communicate, the way of ‘knowing.’ The relationship between mother and child itself is mediated by technology. Technology interrupts the relationship, intercepts the exchange of nurturing and needing of the infantile language. The Mother becomes redundant: technology becomes the external womb.” (280)
I find some faults with this way of thinking; personally I don’t believe that a child’s personality or understanding of its mother is substantially shaped by its time in the womb, and Smith-Windsor’s child’s two months in the incubator occurred during a pre-conscious period. With the unfortunate exceptions of long-term health problems, there is little to suggest that children who finish their development in artificial wombs have a different experience of the world than children born in the customary fashion.
I do, however, think that Smith-Windsor raises some interesting questions about how we understand what constitutes “life.” I may often be accused of not having a life, but most would argue that I am “alive.” Were I to suffer some misfortune that left me conscious but unable to breathe unassisted, I would still be thought alive. But if my consciousness were let slip, the machines would go on inflating and deflating my lungs, shocking my blood into motion. “Even after the body expires, the machines keep going. It is not until they are turned off that we are pronounced ‘dead,’” says Smith.
“What is life?” the great poet Harrison once asked (not to be confused with the poet Haddaway, who asked the equally valid question “What is love?”), and the cyborg casts what seems a simple question into doubt. Smith-Windsor concludes, I think, that by reducing the concept of “life” to a process which can be imitated to perfection by a machine we can no longer differentiate ourselves from it. And, she continues in tones dripping with dystopia, if we are no different from machines then we may similarly be valued only in utilitarian terms.
Spooky.
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