How Fragmentation Creates A Whole

I am genuinely scared.

In Donna Haraway's "Cyborg Manifesto," the idea that 'affinity' and identity are two separate entities arises, ultimately stressing the detachment, or fragmentation, of identity in the face of modern technology. We also see this idea in Turkle's "Who Am We?" with the proliferation of multiple modular identities in MUDs or other online game rooms. This thought seems to link up with Weizenbaum's ideas of autonomy and emotional dependence upon certain technologies, using his ELIZA as an example.

Personally, the in-class experience of ELIZA came across as awkward, stunted, and repetitious, like talking to a little brother who is taken with parroting or playing the imitation game. That anyone could conceive that such an obtuse, cold program could actually function in any type of therapeutic setting seems almost absurd to me. I disagree with Jake when he says that people are paying therapists to listen and then regurgiate mirroring questions; while the mirroring technique is a fundamental tool in psychology, it is most certainly not the only one of value, nor always the appropriate vehicle to use. Therefore, I see ELIZA failing miserably as a therapist, but perhaps excelling as a psychiatrist (as I mentioned in my last post...) that asks only basic, non-feeling questions (what is your medical history?, do you have any allergies to medicine?, what is your diagnosis?). The logic programmed into ELIZA is meant to be just that - logic - and ought to be put to use where it can really be utilized, like in the scientific, or logical, science of modern psychiatry (imagining that psychiatry and psychology or therapy are two separate entities, as they often are nowadays), where you fit a medicine or treatment to a diagnosis through a matter of cause and effect or question and answer. A machine lacking any cognition of the human affect cannot, in my opinion, observe, recognize, and treat consequences of human behavior or the human mentality.

Going back to my point, Haraway's excessive research into the effect of technology and what I might call cyborg culture upon identity (much in the way Turkle also analyzes the modularity of self that comes from MUDs) ultimately reflects Weizenbaum's questioning regarding the capabilities of the computer. Weizenbaum notes that "the question is whether or not every aspect of human thought is reducible to a logical formalism, or, to put it into the modern idiom, whether or not human thought is entirely computable," in his own way probing the depths of the identity dilemma. Who are we if we are so easily replicated by a machine? Can humanity be boiled down into a string of code, fed through a computer, and reproduced without a human body? Haraway discusses a new idea, "a growing recognition of another response through coalition - affinity, not identity," where identity is a sort of blood-defined, genetic, DNA and experience-based infallibility and affinity refers to a relation or connection that has been chosen or adopted. Haraway says, "this identity marks out a self-consciously constructed space that cannot affirm the capacity to act on the basis of natural identification, but only on the basis of conscious coalition, of affinity, of political kinship," when discussing how US women of color classify themselves. In that context, Weizenbaum would probably see a kind of universality of connection, and Turkle even restates this idea, saying that "the screen" both fragments us and allows us to be at our most whole, where all of our parts can coagulate and eventually become one.

Needless to say, I am scared. I'm scared that some people in our society, even some people in this class, could see ELIZA as a fantastic therapist or their Wii Sports character as the conclusive definition of their identity (or should I say affinity?) as a human. While this scares me, it's easy to see how Haraway, Weizenbaum, and Turkle envision something different, where all of this fragmentation of self and redefining of terms to identify the self is really just bringing the "us" at the core, the "oneness" of that "us," into focus.