Gray Kochhar-Lindgren, TechnoLogics

A few quotes from Kochar-Lindgren’s excellent book on technologics, cyborgs and the posthuman. The book is challenging, but well-worth the read.

This does not mean that we, as free ideal beings of spirit, are somehow constrained, captured against our will by the machine-assemblages in one version or another of the iron cage of materialism. It means that the very form of our being, in the simplest form of daily life, is to be technobios, to be cyborg. (Kochhar-Lindgren, 2005: 15)

Identities are multiplying, and all multiplication, the many foldings of cultural textuality, creases the concept of identity. (Kochhar-Lindgren, 2005: 16)

Artificial intelligence, in other words, is not primarily a product of the capitalist social world - although it is that too - but, rather, is constitutive of that world. (Kochhar-Lindgren, 2005: 84)

Just as the so-called natural world is humanized, so, too, the human is naturalized, thingified if you will, but without the negative connotations usually associated with “thing” (as dead, inert, nonconscious, commodified, etc.). If the human is changing its designation, so, too, will all the other terms associated with it. The transepochal occurs when these two enormously powerful forces intersect, thus creating the conditions for the suspension of the (in)animate. The subject becomes object and the object becomes subject. Nature and culture, the physis of the self-blooming and that which is “artificially” constructed by human beings, are now becoming hybridized so that the time of nature and the time of culture are becoming inseparable for the mutants that we are. The time of technologics is the time of, and for, mutation. (Kochhar-Lindgren, 2005: 179)