an international and interdisciplinary journal of postmodern cultural sound, text and image
Volume 18, Spring 2021, ISSN 1552-5112
From Cyclops to Cyborg: Nietzsche, Posthumanism and ‘Embodied
Perspectivism’
Against a rigid conception of the human, various
strands of posthumanism prefer considering the idea of the human an open
concept, which can evolve in almost unlimited ways according to the evolutions
of technology for instance.[1] In
this context, many Nietzsche scholars have considered the notion of Übermensch to be of central significance to
posthuman studies. Although there are some clear connections to be made in this
regard, I will rather focus on his notion of perspectivism—that I
reconceptualise as an ‘embodied perspectivism’—to account for what I consider
to be the metaphorical force of posthumanism in Nietzsche.[2] Indeed,
the abovementioned connection between postmodernism and perspectivism—the idea
that there is no privileged perspective and that a form of ‘objectivity’ can
only be reached through the multiplication of perspectives—brings to the fore a
potential connection to posthumanism through the emphasis on the importance of
the ‘eyes’ which, as we will see, is central both to perspectivism and to a
certain conception of the posthuman Cyborg. In a literal way, multiplying
perspectives involves multiplying eyes, and this multiplication of eyes might
be what the posthuman Cyborg makes possible.
In this paper, I consider the notion of Cyborg as a
metaphor for the perspectival request for a multiplication of eyes. I do not
argue that Nietzsche would be in favour of an actual multiplication of eyes by
means of technology, but that the posthuman Cyborg as developed by Donna Haraway
offers a metaphor for this multiplication of eyes and perspectives. The
postmodern shift from grand narratives to a multiplicity of small narratives
can be coined in the metaphorical shift from Cyclops to Cyborg. Whereas
Nietzsche criticises Socrates’s cyclopean eye and the cyclopic buildings, the
Cyborg offers the counter-metaphor to the Cyclops. My paper is divided in three
parts: first, I discuss Nietzsche’s critique of cyclopic buildings and the
cyclopic monoperspectival view, relating it to the
Cyclops episode in James Joyce’s Ulysses to show the relation between a
cyclopic building and political ideologies; second, I elaborate on Nietzsche’s
perspectivism by showing how it ought to be considered a matter of embodiment
and affect rather than one of knowledge and epistemology; third, I use the term
of Cyborg as a metaphor for the Nietzschean alternative to the Cyclops, while
pointing out the dangers of a literal reading of the Cyborg.
I. Against Cyclopic Ideology
Although the Cyclops is not a central figure in
Nietzsche’s works, his references to the ‘Cyclopian
eye’ and ‘cyclopic buildings’ build on two of the usual characteristics of the
Cyclops: one-eyedness and strength. The first characteristics suggests that the
Cyclops’s way of seeing and understanding the world is limited to a single
perspective; the second suggests that, maybe in order to
compensate this lack of perspectives, the Cyclops relies mainly on its
superhuman strength. Both one-eyedness and strength are characteristics that I
will relate to political nationalism and patriotic ideology, following Joyce’s
reinterpretation of the Cyclops episode in Ulysses. Before moving
towards the political implications of the Cyclops, let us explore how this
figure appears in Nietzsche’s works.
Nietzsche discusses the one-eyedness of the Cyclops in the Birth of Tragedy,
while describing Socrates’s view of tragedy:
Let us now imagine Socrates’ one great Cyclopian eye turned on tragedy, an eye in which the lovely madness of artistic enthusiasm never glowed, let us remember how that eye was debarred from ever looking with pleasure into the abysses of the Dionysiac; what was this eye actually bound to see in the ‘sublime and renowned’ art of tragedy, as Plato called it? Some thing quite unreasonable, with causes which apparently lacked effects and effects which apparently lacked causes, while the whole was so varied and multifarious that it was bound to be repugnant to a reflective disposition, but also dangerous tinder for sensitive and easily aroused souls. (BT 14)
Knowing that, in The Birth of Tragedy,
Nietzsche considers Socrates to bring tragedy to its demise, giving him ‘one
great Cyclopian eye’ can hardly be considered a
positive evaluation. Socrates’s one-eyedness makes him miss the point of
tragedy, as his eye can never experience ‘the lovely madness of artistic
enthusiasm.’ One-eyedness therefore means for Nietzsche an incapacity to view
and live the world in a perspectival manner. Socrates can only see the world
through his sole optics of rationality—an optics that fails to understand
tragedy because the latter precisely appears to lack rationality—and is
therefore limited in his worldview. Unlike Nietzsche’s philosopher of the
future who, as we will see, must ‘be able
to look with many kinds of eyes,’ (BGE 211) the Cyclops remains
imprisoned in a single perspective. Socrates’s one-eyedness prevents him from
experiencing the ‘lovely madness’ of tragedy, prevents him from experiencing
various perspectives, imprisons him in the tunnel vision of his ‘one great Cyclopian eye.’ It is worth noting that Nietzsche’s
philosophical project in The Birth of Tragedy is—at least in the
retrospective account he gives in his ‘Attempt at Self-Criticism’—opposed to
Socrates’s one-eyedness insofar as he consider his
work to manifest the perspectival task ‘to look at science through the prism of
the artist, but also to look at art through the prism of life.’ (BT,
‘Attempt at Self-Criticism’, 2)
The first characteristics Nietzsche attributes to the
Cyclops therefore shows its limitation in seeing, its incapacity to change
perspective, its imprisonment in its one-eyedness. To compensate these mental,
spiritual, and intellectual limitations, the Cyclops possess a great strength.
This second characteristics brings Nietzsche to value the Cyclops somewhat more
positively.
We must always set the cult of culture beside the cult of genius and of might, as its completion and cure: for it knows how to grant a sympathetic assessment to what is material, humble, inferior, misunderstood, weak, imperfect, one-sided, partial, untrue, apparent, even to what is evil and frightful, conceding that all of this is necessary; for the harmony and continued resonance of all that is human, which has been attained by astonishing labors and lucky accidents, and which is as much the work of Cyclopses and ants as of geniuses, must not be lost again: how could we dispense with the common, deep, often uncanny ground bass, without which, of course, melody could not be melody? (HH 2, 186)
The move from The Birth of Tragedy to Human,
All Too Human shows a slight shift in the evaluation of the Cyclops. In
this paragraph, Nietzsche suggests that Cyclopes are as needed as geniuses to
build a culture, in his attempt to revaluate what is often considered inferior.
Although the Cyclopes are dangerous insofar as their view is limited, they are
also needed to build a culture and to build the harmony of all that is human.
Nietzsche considers that the cult of culture acknowledges the necessity of
‘what is material, humble, inferior,’ etc., in the constitution of a harmonic
culture. Nietzsche warns against two dangers here: first, the danger of
overlooking the ‘nearby things’ (WS 5), of falling into the attitude of
a philistine such as David Strauss whom Nietzsche criticises in the first Untimely
Meditation. This danger amounts to considering the ‘higher culture’
perspective to be the only and the best possible one, thus falling into the
one-eyedness of philistines and into the traps laid by the metaphysicians and
the priests who value rationality in a way similar to
Socrates.[3] Second,
the opposite danger of considering ‘what is material, humble, inferior,’ etc.
as the only perspective. As we will see in the next section, art is precisely
one way of avoiding such a trap. The two dangers opposed here are, on the one
hand, considering the ‘higher culture’ as reality itself, thus overlooking the
ordinary and everyday aspects of our lives and, on the other hand, of
considering quotidian life, i.e. ‘what is closest at
hand and most vulgar,’ (GS 78) as being the whole of reality. Both
dangers amount to a failure to encompass different perspectives and therefore
to be imprisoned in a single one.
Nietzsche further develops the relation between
Cyclopes and force in his discussion of cyclopic buildings. Architecturally
speaking, these buildings are called so because they are made of stones so
large that they are considered, mythically, to have been built by the Cyclopes
themselves.
Now is the age of cyclopic buildings! Finally, there is certainty about the foundations, so that the entire future can build upon them without danger! Impossible hence forth for the fields of culture ever again to be destroyed overnight by wild and senseless mountain waters! Stone dams and protective walls against barbarians, against plagues, against physical and spiritual enslavement! And all of this at first under stood literally and crudely, but gradually in an ever more elevated and spiritual way, so that all of the measures mentioned above seem to be the clever composite preparations of the highest artist of horticulture, who can turn for the first time to his own real task once the other tasks have been completely accomplished! (WS 275)
The cyclopic buildings offer a security which allow
society to prosper and develop itself in a safe environment. However, in this
paragraph from The Wanderer and his Shadow, Nietzsche praises this
safety in an ironic way. He is criticising the democratisation of Europe, and
the impossibility to stop this process. The cyclopic buildings offer, as it
were, the architecture on which democracy can arise. It is well-known that
Nietzsche is rather critical of democracy and this criticism transfers onto
cyclopic buildings.[4] Nietzsche’s
use of irony can be understood as a criticism of the ‘certainty about the
foundations’ which suggests that this consideration of the cyclopic buildings
as the safe ground to build democracy is ill-thought. To the contrary,
Nietzsche might be indicating that the democratisation of Europe is built on
unsafe grounds. The cyclopic buildings offer only a sense of safety, a sense of
a danger-free future, whereas Nietzsche points out that the greatest danger
might in fact come from within these cyclopic walls. If Nietzsche anticipates
postmodern themes, we can consider that the whole idea of having safe and
certain foundations is not only questionable but also a logical inconsistency
as these foundations for the development of human culture are themselves
unfounded.
These foundations, to the contrary, might be rather
detrimental to human culture as they create the grounds for the development of
a single-eyed perspective, a cyclopic perspective, which takes the form, within
democracy, of nationalism and patriotic ideology. They would therefore lead to
the decline rather than the thriving of human culture. In this context, the
Cyclops, with its one-eyedness and its force, represents the figure of such
political and ideological tendencies. This metaphor of the Cyclops as figuring
the single-mindedness and the single-eyedness that leads to nationalist
ideologies is aptly used by James Joyce in Chapter 12 of Ulysses, the
Cyclopes episode, in which Bloom encounters ‘the Citizen,’ a nationalist and
xenophobe. Like the Cyclops, the Citizen is single-minded and considers force a
central criterion to evaluate political views. Vincent Sherry relates the
Citizen’s confrontation with Bloom to an opposition between man and woman
which, as we will see in section III, is central to Donna Haraway’s conception
of the Cyborg:
However righteous these indignations may be, they seem, like the Citizen’s, chiefly to feed and sustain and accelerate the cycle of offense and retribution. How Bloom counters this dire liability shows the full force and effect of Joyce’s feminization of epic, which here opposes the Citizen as Cyclops, as gigantistic cartoon of male consciousness, to Bloom’s womanly Odysseus. The Cyclops, his one eye bulging in the middle of his forehead as caricature of phallocentric single vision, promotes a politics of xenophobia, a patriotism premised on intolerance of the other. (Sherry 2004, 53)
In this sense, the Citizen represents an old-fashioned
way of thinking, the one Nietzsche criticises in the metaphysicians and the
priests, the one that is incapable of changing perspective.
In Joyce’s Ulysses, Bloom therefore becomes the
counterpart of the Citizen by showing a perspectival way of seeing the world.
He considers life to be completely opposite to what the Citizen believes:
—But it's no use, says he. Force, hatred, history, all that. That's not life for men and women, insult and hatred. And everybody knows that it's the very opposite of that that is really life.
—What? says Alf.
—Love, says Bloom. I mean the opposite of hatred. I must go now, says he to John Wyse. Just round to the court a moment to see if Martin is there. If he comes just say I'll be back in a second. Just a moment. (Joyce 1984, 2:716)
Against the single-eyedness of the Cyclops-Citizen,
Bloom remains open-minded and tries to adopt a broader perspective. Love and
tolerance are therefore privileged over hatred and force. The Citizen, who is
openly nationalist and anti-Semite, represents a line of thinking (or rather
not thinking) that leads to political troubles. In other words, the Citizen
represents the ideological gaze with its single eye and single mind.
The cyclopic buildings on which democracy is built,
while rejecting external dangers (floods, barbarian, illnesses as Nietzsche
argues) contains and feeds an internal danger, that of patriotic ideology, that
of cyclopic thought. Nietzsche’s embodied perspectivism, because of its
relation to affects (to this extent similar to Bloom’s
focus on love), offers the conceptual grounds to oppose patriotic ideology.
II. Nietzsche’s Embodied
Perspectivism
It has become rather common to consider perspectivism
as the epistemological doctrine according to which ‘there are no facts, only
interpretations.’ (Danto 2005, 59)[5] This
focus on epistemology has however overshadowed two aspects of perspectivism
that are of central importance to my interpretation: first, that perspectivism
is primarily related to vision before knowledge and, second, that perspectivism
is not an abstract and theoretical doctrine, but must be lived and experienced.
The first aspect presents what I would call an ‘aesthetic perspectivism’ in
which seeing is central and therefore relates to notion of eyes.[6] The
second aspect relates to the embodiment of perspectives that, as we will see,
connects to the posthuman Cyborg, following to some extent Pierre Klossowski’s interpretation of drives as operating within
us as perspectival agents. (Klossowski 1997, 44) This suggests that perspectivism qua shifts in
vision reflects the internal constitution of our drives: perspectivism as a perceptual
doctrine—an epistemological one only at a second stage—relies on the ‘embodied
perspectivism’ that constitutes us.
According to Paul Katsafanas, this perspectival
constitution of ourselves can be understood in the sense that the
interpretation of our drives is necessarily perspectival, and hence there is no
unique way to understand them:
When we put this claim together with the perspectivist thesis that there is no way to say that one of these ways is the “right way,” we end up with the following result: even if we could acquire concepts that were maximally specific, the meanings of these concepts and the interconceptual relations would be determined in a holistic fashion, as part of a framework of concepts, foundational beliefs, and standards of justification. So the concepts would be maximally specific from the standpoint of a series of beliefs and standards of justification, but there are always other foundational beliefs and standards of justification that we could adopt, and doing so would lead to a different set of maximally specific concepts. (Katsafanas 2016, 53–54)
If we follow Nietzsche’s perspectivism, we can
understand ourselves only in a perspectival way, as we interpret our drives
from a certain conceptual framework. Using a Wittgensteinian
vocabulary, we could say that the interpretation of our drives is dependent on
our form of life. Changing perspective would therefore not only require
changing our perception within our form of life but also experiencing another
form of life. This idea of changing our form of life comes back to the
perspectival drives and the embodiment of perspectivism. To be trapped within
one perspective is therefore to be trapped in a conceptual framework, to be
trapped in a form of life, to be trapped in a certain interpretation of drives.
In The Gay Science, Nietzsche argues that this
trap is the trap of the banal and that only theatre can overcome the banality
of the common perspective:
Without this art [of theatre] we would be nothing but the foreground and live entirely in the spell of that perspective which makes what is closest at hand and most vulgar appear as if it were vast, and reality itself. (GS 78)
The idea is not that theatre is the only or the best
way of multiplying perspectives, but that the conscious and explicit staging
that is at play in theatre reveals the perhaps unconscious and implicit staging
that pervades our everyday life. As we have seen, Socrates’s ‘great Cyclopian eye’ prevents him from experiencing tragedy,
prevents him from overcoming the spell of his perspective, that of rationality.
Even though Nietzsche argues, as we have seen in the previous section, that we
must pay attention to ‘nearby things,’ to the ‘common, deep, often uncanny
ground bass, without which, of course, melody could not be melody’ that the
Cyclopes build, we must not remain within this perspective. Unlike Socrates,
Nietzsche suggests that taking art (and here theatre) seriously involves being
able to experience various perspectives.
The experiencing of many perspectives, as already
mentioned in the previous section, is the reason why Nietzsche considers that
the philosopher of the future:
…needs to have been a critic and a sceptic and a dogmatic and an historian, and in addition a poet and collector and traveller and puzzle-solver and moralist and seer and ‘free spirit’ and nearly all things, so that he can traverse the range of human values and value-feelings and be able to look with many kinds of eyes and consciences from the corners into every wide expanse. (BGE 211)
In contrast to the Cyclops, the philosopher of the
future must ‘be able to look with many kinds of eyes and consciences.’
These many eyes and consciences are ways of escaping the ideological
perspective that the Cyclops and Joyce’s Citizen follow. Whereas the Cyclops
has only one mode of living, the philosopher of the future has multiple
possibilities. These possibilities arise from the capacity to multiply points of
view. But more than a mere multiplication of points of view, perspectivism
requires one to embody different ways of being, not just to see through various
lenses. To be able to look as a historian for instance
requires to experience the way of life of the historian, to embody the
historian’s perspective. The philosopher of the future is therefore not only
the one with most eyes, but her many eyes represent the many lives she
experiences and embodies.
Nietzsche further connects eyes and feelings, perspectives and embodiment, in considering that:
Perspectival seeing is the only kind of seeing there is, perspectival ‘knowing’ the only kind of ‘knowing’; and the more the feelings about a matter which we allow to come to expression, the more eyes, different eyes through which we are able to view this same matter, the more complete our ‘conception’ of it, our ’objectivity’, will be. (GM III, 12)
Objectivity for Nietzsche does therefore not rely on a
dismissal of feelings, but rather on the multiplication of them. It is only by
multiplying feelings, i.e. by embodying multiple
perspectives, that we can reach a form of ‘objectivity.’ Against the idea of
objectivity being a God’s eye perspective, i.e. a perspective
that overlooks everything and is unique, Nietzsche’s perspectivism suggests
that there is no such overlooking perspective. The subject, in order to reach a
form of ‘objectivity,’ must experience, i.e. embody,
these various perspectives. Multiplying our perspectives is not only a matter
of multiplying our eyes, but also of multiplying our feelings, multiplying the
ways in which we interpret what our eyes see. Multiplying our eyes, in contrast
to the Cyclops, is therefore to enhance our body and our mind. But what is this
enhancement if not a cyborgisation of ourselves? From
the postmodern injunction to multiply perspectives in order
to overcome the limitations of what Lyotard calls the ‘metanarrative,’
we move to the posthuman ideal to multiply our eyes.
III. The Postmodern Cyborg as
Metaphor
The Cyborg, insofar as it enhances the human body, can
be seen as an attempt to physically and cybernetically enhance the human, to
give it more eyes, against the Cyclops’s single-eyedness. Interestingly, most
popular representations of Cyborgs include an enhancement of the eye, be it as
an external device (a third eye for instance) or as internal programme.
Enhancing the possibilities of sight seems to be central to the Cyborg. As we
have seen however, if the Cyclops’s one-eyedness reflects an ideological
single-mindedness, does the enhanced cybernetic eye overcome it? In order to explore how the Cyborg might offer a
metaphorical figure for Nietzsche’s perspectivism and a possible overcoming of
patriotic ideology, I will mainly focus on Donna Haraway’s famous ‘Cyborg
Manifesto’, because her conception of the Cyborg interestingly relates the
initial idea of the Cyborg as brute (military) force to a potential
revolutionary Cyborg. Against the reading of the Cyborg as a
military and ideological force, Haraway’s posthuman Cyborg is a revolutionary
force that works against the military order from which it originates.
Haraway defines the Cyborg
as follows: ‘A
Cyborg is a cybernetic organism, a hybrid of machine and organism, a creature
of social reality as well as a creature of fiction. Social reality is lived
social relations, our most important political construction, a world-changing
fiction.’ (Haraway 2015, 149) Because it is a hybrid between social reality and
fiction, the Cyborg can act upon the former. Against the view that the Cyborg would
be the guardian of ideology, in the sense that the Cyclops is, Haraway
considers that the Cyborg has a role to play in revolution, in changing how the
world is viewed and thought: ‘So my cyborg myth is about transgressed
boundaries, potent fusions, and dangerous possibilities which progressive
people might explore as one part of needed political work.’ (Haraway 2015, 154) The Cyborg becomes a ‘world-changing fiction’ by acting
upon social reality. By transgressing the norms, the Cyborg offers an
alternative, which originally offers to overcome the dualistic and binary
thinking, especially regarding the man-woman dualism, offers a way to act upon
this social reality which is, in fact, a political fiction.[7] The
Cyborg’s original aim to overcome dualisms connects to the heart of Nietzsche’s
philosophy, namely the attempt to overcome the metaphysical dualisms that have
plagued the history of philosophy since Plato.[8] The
Cyborg presented in such a light is therefore a revolutionary force acting to
overcome the fiction of dualisms, this much too old philosophical, social, and
political construct.
Despite
this revolutionary component, Haraway suggests that we must not forget the ideological
dimension of the Cyborg. As
abovementioned, two visions of the Cyborg stand opposite one another: as a
dominating force on the one hand and as a revolutionary force on the other
hand. In her attempt to overcome
dualisms, Haraway argues that we should envision both perspectives, both
domination and revolution in the figure of the Cyborg:
From one perspective, a cyborg world is about the final imposition of a grid of control on the planet, about the final abstraction embodied in a Star Wars apocalypse waged in the name of defence, about the final appropriation of women’s bodies in a masculinist orgy of war. From another perspective, a cyborg world might be about lived social and bodily realities in which people are not afraid of their joint kinship with animals and machines, not afraid of permanently partial identities and contradictory standpoints. The political struggle is to see from both perspectives at once because each reveals both dominations and possibilities unimaginable from the other vantage point. Single vision produces worse illusions than double vision or many-headed monsters. (Haraway 2015, 154)
We must avoid single vision, i.e.
we must avoid being Cyclopes, and one way to do so is, I argue, to adopt
Nietzsche’s perspectivism. Being a Cyborg is precisely a way of envisioning
multiple perspectives at the same time, and that means multiple perspectives on
the Cyborg itself. The idea of a ‘many-headed monster’ can be viewed, in a
perspectival vocabulary, as a ‘many-eyed monster’, a figure that sees through
multiple perspectives at the same time, a figure that enacts perspectivism in
its physiology and biology. The difficulty, Haraway notes, is ‘to see from both
perspectives at once’ because they might seem, and probably are, contradictory
to one another. This difficulty is the reason why perspectivism must be
embodied and not just considered as a change of optics or lenses: an ‘embodied
perspectivism’ is not just a matter of seeing things from different
perspectives but integrating these various perspectives in the body.
The Cyborg therefore represents, metaphorically at
least, the possibility of this embodiment of perspectivism.
However, there is a danger to the cyborgisation
of the world. Overcoming the dualisms is not merely a physical act, but one
that engages one’s state of mind, and thus requires precisely overcoming the
mind-body dualism that is at play in this distinction between physical acts and
state of mind. While remaining in this mind-body dualism, it is possible to
remain a Cyclops (mentally) while being a Cyborg (physically), and hence the
Cyborg in this Nietzschean sense must be understood metaphorically, as a
multiplication of conceptual eyes rather than a multiplication of physical or
cybernetic ones. We could easily imagine that the power to cybernetically
enhance one’s body could reinforce existing dualisms and structures of power
rather than overcome them.
This danger is precisely the one that Achille Mbembe is wary of in discussing the question of race:
In fact, there is good reason to believe that in a more or less distant future genetic techniques will be used to manage the characteristics of populations to eliminate races judged ‘undesirable’ through the selection of trisomic embryos, or through theriomorphism (hybridization with animal elements) or ‘cyborgization’ (hybridization with artificial elements). Nor is it impossible to believe that we will arrive at a point where the fundamental role of medicine will be not only to bring a sick organism back to health but to use medical techniques of molecular engineering to refashion life itself along lines defined by racial determinism. Race and racism, then, do not only have a past. They also have a future, particularly in a context where the possibility of transforming life and creating mutant species no longer belongs to the realm of fiction. (Mbembe 2017, 21)
The ideological one-eyedness and single-mindedness of
the Cyclops is not only a thing of the past, according Mbembe,
it has a future. And this future could even be much bleaker than the present as
technological ‘progress’ could overcome dualisms not through a multiplication
of perspectives, and therefore an embrace of the variety of perspectives, but
through the establishment of an absolute domination that would, in time,
eradicate variety in favour of uniformity. Mbembe
argues that this eradication originates in the change from a medicine that
brings organisms back to life to a medicine that enhances and redefines the
human. If medicine plays the role of redefining the human, it can do so to make
all humans alike (and eradicate those who do not conform to this norm). In this
notion of medicine lies the ambiguity of the posthuman, the dream of
encompassing all forms of being and the danger of uniformising all forms of
being.
This danger of cyborgisation
is already here according to Mbembe, we are in a
sense Cyborgs with cyclopic minds. Haraway suggests something similar in saying
that the becoming Cyborg of the human is already in action, that we are all
Cyborgs:
In so far as we know ourselves in both formal discourse (for example, biology) and in daily practice (for example, the homework economy in the integrated circuit), we find ourselves to be cyborgs, hybrids, mosaics, chimeras. (Haraway 2015, 177)
If the Cyborg is to be a metaphorical figure for the
posthuman in the postmodern world, it must avoid being a cyclopic Cyborg and to
the contrary enact the multiplication of perspectives. This is where
Nietzsche’s philosophy connects to posthuman studies: it is not only as a
prefiguration of posthuman themes, but as a warning against the dangers of a
cyclopic Cyborg. To avoid being a Cyclops, the Cyborg must continually strive
to be the ‘thinking against dualisms,’ (Hoquet 2011) to borrow Thierry Hoquet’s
title, because as long as the Cyborg does not become a force against dualisms,
as long as the Cyborg remains within the perspective of mere domination, it
cannot be of use for revolution, but will only serve repression instead.
To conclude, the Cyclops and the Cyborg represent two
metaphors for our ways of being in the world. As we have seen, the Cyborg
offers an alternative to the Cyclops, in which many eyes replace the single
one. But the replacement of eyes in a purely physical, physiological, or
technological manner is of no use to overcome the danger of the Cyclops. The
only Cyborg overcoming of the Cyclops is the embodiment of perspectivism. In
this sense, to understand the Cyborg in a Nietzschean way is to consider it as
a proponent of perspectivism, as enacting perspectivism biologically and
physiologically. This embodiment does not necessarily involve a cybernetic
enhancement. The Cyborg qua proponent of perspectivism is a metaphor
rather than a literal figure. It is worth noting that popular culture often
represents the Cyborg as having cyclopic eyes rather than Nietzschean ones.
More than a mere cybernetic enhancement, the multiplication of eyes should
rather be a multiplication of ways of seeing and knowing. Inasmuch as we are
Cyclopes without having one eye, we must attempt to become posthuman Cyborgs
without necessarily multiplying our eyes in a literal way. This attempt does
less require a change in physiology than a change in our ways of thinking.
Inasmuch as the Cyclops is a mythical creature of the past, the Cyborg is the
mythical figure for the postmodern and posthuman world. What Nietzsche teaches
us about this postmodern and posthuman world is that the work to be done is not
to become literal Cyborgs (in the sense of the cyclopic Cyborgs we already are,
even more enhanced by means of technology), but to show ways in which we can
become posthuman Cyborgs that overcome the Cyclops. It is in this understanding
of the Cyborg that we can understand the postmodern, considering it not as a
relativistic thought, but as a way of conceptualising the multiplication of
perspectives. The posthuman, in this context, is the embodiment of the
postmodern multiplication of perspectives and the overcoming of the traditional
cyclopic worldview.
an international and interdisciplinary journal of postmodern cultural sound, text and image
Volume 18, Spring
2021, ISSN 1552-5112
Notes