Fiction in the Integrated Circuit

This study takes up the question of the cyborg through a close reading of key historical texts in the technical and scientific literature informing modern integrated circuit technology, and of twentieth- and twenty-first century texts in continental theory and philosophy, in order to present a viable notion of subjectivity for our technological age. To this end, this study articulates a morphology of the cyborg as a philosophical, political, and technological subject uniquely situated and acting in the world, a subject that upends conceptions of truth and knowledge as representation or correspondence. The cyborg instead presents a playful sensibility in touch with the openness of existence itself to becoming, newness, and life. Through her skillful traversal of the world-machine the cyborg resists established networks of power, creating havens of intimacy in the dark away from the searing light of transcendental reason.