What do cyborgs eat?

OK. Starting in on my second time round with Margaret Morse's "What do cyborgs eat? Oral logic in an information society" It's a long article and I got a bit confused the first time round, so I thought it might be helpful (or perhaps just very very dull) to put down key points as I understand them as I go along. If it doesn't help, I'll know not to do it again :-)

to start: first impressions
After reading the article for the first time the other day, I came away a bit confused - I think my confusion has largely to do with Morse's term "oral logic". It wasn't clear to me exactly what she meant by this and some of the article seemed to do with actual culinary matters ("meat", "nonfood"), more of it seemed to do with the connection of the human and the technical, with forays into the subconscious of childhood, "cannibalistic fantasies", body-image realities and vs ideals, real food vs the genetically modified or purely synthetic "food" what might be termed "better living through science" - smart drugs and their effects, and finally excremental art. While some of what Morse said within these sections made a lot of sense, I've not quite been able to capture the direction of the whole.

so... on to take 2...

• "growing desire to disengage from the human condition"
• 2 bodies - the physical and the electronic avatar - suggestion that the physical has more disadvantages than advantages, whereas the avatar "has superpowers, albeit virtually, and is immortal" (capable of enduring endless deaths)
• definition of a cyborg: "a human individual who has some of its vital bodily processes controlled by cybernetically operated devices"
• Acknowledgement that the cyborg may not necessarily be considered as a literal being, but could be merely a fantasy - or a metaphor.
• "Willing the cyborg into being appears to be the equivalent of wishing the problems of organic life away"
• "The contemporary fantasy is... if the organic body cannot be abandoned, it might be fused with electronic culture in what amounts to an oral logic of incorporation"
• "context of body loathing and machine desire"
• Intro splits article into three sections:
  1. Oral logic of incorporation into the electronic machine (eating/being eaten or being covered by a second skin) - I take this to mean that our desire for technology leads naturally towards a desire to become one with it - by consuming it, being consumed by it or completely wrapping ourselves up in it.
  2. Famine vs abundance, fast vs fresh food - "in this cultureal context of ideological failure and the desire to become (not merely to have) electronic machines that food per se can be - at least symbolically - refused" (OK. haven't quite got this one even initially sorted yet...)
  3. Culinary and corporeal negation - virtual reality, fat-free fat, smart drugs, etc. So this I take to mean technologically-enabled ways of eating that negate the concept of eating to a certain extent.

Oral logic: The dialectics of incorporation
Not really getting this - too tired! - but here's a stab at it anyway:

Identification vs immersion - identification holding up a mirror, whereas immersion ("the 'immersive' aspects of electronic media") isn't just looking at something, it's being in the thick of it - "involves introjecting or surrounding the other (or being introjected or surrounded) and ultimately, the mixing of two 'bodies' in a dialectic (exchange of reasonable arguments, says dictionary.com) of inside and outside"

Identification associated with the cinema - depends on a certain distance; new media's immersive aspects pull the user right in and are dependent on direct user interaction and involvement. A movie will keep on playing whether you're paying attention or not - an interactive/immersive new media piece will only go so far without your input - in essence a symbiotic relationship between artwork and user??? certainly for the artwork - it can't proceed without the user, and I guess the user's interest makes them somewhat dependent on the artwork proceeding... oh dear. think I'm going to regret all this later. Anyway, next point:

Morse seems very keen to associate the act of immersion with eating - the way she describes it though (and the parallels she draws - eating/eaten, enveloping/being enveloped) seem to my admittedly fuzzy brain to draw perhaps an even closer parallel with sex. Even more than eating, sex is a corporeal function which overrides the feeling of being "incorporated" (does that make sense in this context) - it draws the participants out of the trappings of their bodies for a time, whereas while eating does sometimes have a similar effect, more often it is clearly associated with the body (i.e. after sex, one feels somewhat disembodied for a time, whereas after eating one frequently feels full, weighed down by what one has eaten [possibly sick] and more aware than ever of the presence of the body).

Next bit: use of "nonfood" - "Vitamin gels and chemical soups qualify precisely because they blur the categories of food and drugs" - I guess this then reduces the act of eating to the mere consuming of nutrients - eating as refueling rather than eating as a physical pleasure. Recharging the body too in ways that require a minimum of processing, a minimum of byproducts of consumption - "the strategy is not only to feed the mind but in the process to purify the body of organic deterioration".

I guess the human desire for immortality is an obvious aspect of human/technology hybrids - after all, it's been a recurrent theme down through the ages. Immortality in itself includes a negation of the physical body - it's the mind, the consciousness, the soul that appears to be the "live" part of us - in order to live on, it seems that we just need to fix the organic body's nasty tendency to break down and decay - to replace the dud bits with technology, either in part or wholly would seem to be the next logical step for an extreme technophile.

Not entirely convinced by her arguments in favour of cannibalistic fantasies - whether of another or of being oneself consumed. Does this come from Freud or someone?? Think I'd need to read more about the original reasoning behind this to really understand it - stated baldly it comes across as unconvincing.

Second skins: "the cannibalistic fantasy of introjection has a counterpart in the reverse gesture, that of covering oneself with the other as a means of self-transformation". Not sure where her examples - Aztec rituals, conquistador massacres, flayings in Yugoslavia - are intended to be applied here.

"When political boundaries fall apart, ego and identity are also threatened with fragmentation, and they must be radically fortified or surrender to dissolution or transformation... an ordinary skin may no longer be enough to contain the ego or to protect bodily fluids from escaping or pollution and irritants from the outside world from entering" - simultaneously protecting/preserving the body and expressing it more dramatically perhaps? There's also the element of disguise, which is often an aspect of preservation.

Virtual reality: "the second skin (or 'interface') that mediates the virtual world also masks the apparatus of that mediation. This masking allows the referential to appear to collapse into the symbolic field: to utter the symbol for an action is to perform the act itself"

Enough, I think (it is 1am now). Tomorrow, part 2...