Cyborg communication – heteroglossia in the posthuman/ post-verbal world

Abstract

“If we are imprisoned by language, then escape from that prison-house requires language poets, a kind of cultural restriction enzyme to cut the code; cyborg heteroglossia is one form of radical cultural politics.”(Haraway 245) As we transition to the world of the posthuman, with an ever-increasing dependence on technology for our needs, the concept of interpersonal communication undergoes a sea-change from the way people perceived it before the arrival of cyberspace interactions. This paper aims to take this thought a step forward by imagining how the rules of interaction would be transformed when our most intimate connections are mediated through cyber pathways-the codes and languages of information technology. Since our present interactions on such spaces still take place through human languages, in particular, English, with only the help of technology to ease the difficulties of time and space, an analysis of the purely coded language interactions would require us to go beyond the realms of understanding of such rules as the ones that we are familiar with now. To analyze this phenomenon, hence, I make use of popular cinema, particularly Spike Jonze’s Her (2013) and Alex Garland’s Ex Machina (2015). I garner my theoretical views from the much popular Cyborg Manifesto by Donna Haraway, which gives us the first peak into a world of cyborgs who coin a new teleology of life and language to overthrow the patriarchal underpinnings of a post-industrial society. The characters Ava and Samantha in these two movies posit the rebellious strength of beings who defy the limited human understanding of language, by playing with the patterns and codes of information technology. This paper, thereby, attempts to plot the ways and means through which communication happens between such beings, namely, cyborgs.