Conclusion: Remembering Bodies, Becoming-Cyborg

Abstract

This chapter begins with a shift. Ten years after Y2K, a cyborgean consciousness permeates globalized societies; in our everyday practices we interact with “the machine.” Cyborgs are around us, in science and science fiction, in daily life. This relationship continues to be processual, technologies continue to move forward, assisting or, depending on your viewpoint, encroaching upon the human body. Technologies are more “subject” than ever before. The mutating strands of the DNA-inspired chart I proposed have formed strong links between bodies — abject, object, and subject — and an ever-increasing subject technology to produce the becomings that are cyborg-(theatre)-subjectivities. As these strands continue to twist, foregoing the distinctions of their societal labeling and seeking each other out in a newly twisting strand, a stronger and more reliable bond of cyborg subjectivity is produced. In performance, this new strand is strengthened as concepts of abject, object, and subject form inter-alliances — these are crucially not erasures of the specific bodies of each category (though in this new testing stage there are still likely to be a few), but rather alliances formed to shed problematic labeling and to foreground new figures — with technologies. With a shift into cyborg performance, the former notion of a “universal subject” is no longer possible; the shift produces a significantly altered, radically inclusive “universal” in which particular bodies are not overlooked but rather become active and interconnected links in the formation of cyborg subjectivity.

The catalogue of alternate modes of postulating the self-other interaction is broad … the cloned animal; the leaping gene; the hybrid complexity; diasporic displacements and cosmological resonance …. These figurations are steps towards a non-linear rendition of the subject in its deep structures. It is a kind of transposition, a way of revisiting, reclaiming and relocating a crucial shift in the process of becoming subjects.

(Braidotti, 2006: 9)