Sing the body cyborg: The dialectic of embodiment in technological praxis.

This act of making is always mediated by technology of some form. As both Marx and Engels argue, since we are essentially makers and creators, and the process of making always involves the application of the technological, it seems worthwhile to approach the problem of embodiment through the lens of the cyborg---a hybrid of machine and organism. Donna Haraway writes that the cyborg symbolizes the reconstitutive human. The cyborgian figure articulates our current reality. In our wearable computers and our pacemakers, we find our organicism continually breached, such that the difference between natural and artificial, mind and body, self-developing and externally designed. Similarly, the cyborg arises as a symbol of this perennially reconfigured human at the intersection of the various processes and knowledges that have informed and facilitated that configuration in the last two centuries. I have used the cyborg as a tool to capture the historically evolving human in its various moments of praxis to examine the implications of embodiment. (Abstract shortened by UMI.)Dept. of English Language, Literature, and Creative Writing. Paper copy at Leddy Library: Theses & Major Papers - Basement, West Bldg. / Call Number: Thesis2004 .S245. Source: Masters Abstracts International, Volume: 43-05, page: 1560. Adviser: Stephen Pender. Thesis (M.A.)--University of Windsor (Canada), 2004