Gerrit Krueper is a PhD student of Cinema and Media Studies at the University of British Columbia. His research focuses on a post-humanist theory of the cyborg that reads the cyber-body (production, resources, labor force, tools of labor/production, material) and the cyber-brain (consciousness, social-relation, network, political) as essential to the creation of a new ontology of the human. Demonstrating the practice of such theory, he is specifically interested in the analysis of video games and their potential as platforms of ethical production of the self and the practice of one’s social being.
Becoming Cyborg: Liberating One’s Real Species-Being in Cognitive Capital
| The material is essential to the ontological question of being human. Cognitive capitalism and its rise of technology translates the human body into literal instruments of labor. However, the link of technology with the laborer enables a transfer of skills and powers that extend the body’s capabilities, creating a cyber-body. The material reality of the cyber-body is ambivalent: It is a reality of exploitation and abstraction, designed to eventually create infinite capital accumulation, as well as a reality of liberation potentials (through re-appropriating one’s cyborg body to connect to nature and the social). Put together, this ambivalence recovers the real species-being. |
