I would like to introduce you to two radical images: the Cyborg and the Hermit.
The realm of the cyborg (Haraway) is a highly artificial realm, a realm in which everything is constructed, including what we sometimes call nature. Nothing is pure, everything is transfigured by the curious and unstoppable winds of contingency. The cyborg has no original or everlasting centre. For the cyborg, a creature of communication, objectivity has been replaced by ‘intersubjectivity’ (Rorty). The cyborg is thus pragmatic and accepting of the contingency of its thrownness.
The hermit is everything that the cyborg is not. The hermit seeks the authentic and the real, wants to touch the soil with his fingers. The hermit dreams of home and paradise lost. The hermit seeks to reclaim a lost unity.
Where the hermit relishes in their own fallibility, the shortness of their arm and the limits of their vision becoming badges of their humanity, the cyborg replaces its parts as they fail, extending their reach through vast wireless networks and extending their life into the future. The hermit is nostalgic, but not the cyborg who associates nostalgia with death and for whom the past is gone.
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