note about a cyborg

Dead tired, de-caffeinated, and quite The Grump, I came to work today suddenly perked by the following note, left by a student in my summer class, on my office door:

I came by your office today to see if you had my final paper.

Also, my uncle and I had a huge argument over the weekend.  We watched that cyborg movie based on the book we read for class.  I told my uncle that the bounty hunter was a cyborg and he said that he wasn’t.  It was funny.  He got really mad and we haven’t spoken since. I really should give him the cyborg article we read in class, don’t you think?

celebrity skinjobs

“I am a robot, I am an android, I am a cyborg, I am a skinjob” — Martin Amis

They annoy us. They compel us. They reflect us. They’re our collective scapegoats. They’re our convenient narratives — bodies and textual bodies onto which we project fantasies, nightmares, anxieties, appetites. But of course, they’re real people. (They eat and shit like the rest of us). So, in a sense, then, they’re cyborgs. “The cyborg,” notes Donna Harway, “is a matter of fiction and lived experience.” They are “chimeras, theorized and fabricated hybrids of machine and organism.” Hollywood’s mechanism is the ability to mass produce and project idealized images of ourselves back to us, images we consume like little vampires in the artificially-produced night of the movie theater. If we’re not critical thinkers and close celluloid readers, we’ll mistake these idealized images for need, and as Baudrillard cautions us “need” is ideology in action, not nature as given. [Side bar: ever walk out of a movie theater after two hours of celluloid-overload, somewhat crestfallen over the fact that the real-life to which you're returning is nothing like the one in which you just completely lost yourself?] When Roy, the replicant, says to Terrell, his maker, and I paraphrase, “If you could see what I’ve seen with your eyes,” he laments the eerie position of the cyborg whose reality is always-already mediated by and through the eyes, dreams, and fears of another. The cyborg — and the celebrity — share a similar mediating function. They are hybrids of selfhood and others’ projections. Tom Cruise exists somewhere — he might be eating a cheeseburger and reading the latest Scientology newslwetter — but “Tom Cruise” also exists, in interviews, snapshots, televised fundraisers, movie trailers, soundbites, gossip. The celebrity (“Tom” not Tom) and the cyborg, in other words, are media darlings precisely because they live in constant mediation between the real and the artificial, the machine and the organism, the fiction and the lived. I don’t care for one particular celluloid skinjob, but she’s in many ways a very clever one, a narcissistic anti-celebrity who actually uses her celebrity to mock the machine who makes her. You probably recognize this:

When I wake up in my makeup
It’s too early for that dress
Wilted and faded somewhere in hollywood
I’m glad I came here
With your pound of flesh
– “Celebrity Skin,” Hole