This chapter demonstrates that the construct of the robotic human has implications for the way Americans have understood racism and sexism sociologically and culturally. His second chapter brings together Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man, Ken Kesey's One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest, and Betty Friedan's Feminist Mystique to articulate how the idea of the human automaton could be used to anti-institutional purposes. In this chapter, Selisker discusses how language itself can be (or can be perceived as) a technology of totalitarianism. For example, his first chapter takes up George Orwell's 1984, The Manchurian Candidate, and Joost Meerloo's concerns about the television as a tool of social control. He often juxtaposes artifacts and ideas that seem unrelated at first glance, in order to draw out themes that cut across the disciplinary boundaries of literary and intellectual history. Watson's work in behavioral psychology, Norbert Wiener's cybernetics, theories of post- and trans-humanism, fiction and nonfiction representations of "brainwashing," and cinematic and televisual representations of figurative and literal robots. Selisker analyzes an astounding array of sources in this study, including John B. Human Programming ultimately expands discussions about the "humanist-posthumanist divide" (p.9) by demonstrating how the idea of automatism has been used to create a human-subhuman divide-one that distinguishes the presumably free-thinking American from the racial, religious, or political Other. Katherine Hayles, Bruno Latour, Jacques Rancière, and Cary Wolfe. Human Programming also engages more directly with such scholars as Donna Haraway, N. In its exploration of the entangled concepts of humanness and mechanism, it brings to mind Steve Woolgar's "Reconstructing Man and Machine: A Note on Sociological Critiques of Cognitivism" from The Social Construction of Technological Systems: New Directions in the Sociology and History of Technology (MIT, 2012). Its methodology resembles the scholarship of Leo Marx, Priscilla Wald, and others like myself who blend literary and cultural history.
While this book does not purport to be a history of technology, it will interest cultural historians-especially those who study the ethics of technology and rhetoric. Scott Selisker's Human Programming examines the idea of the human automaton and traces how it has inflected the understanding of freedom and unfreedom in the United States from the 1940s through today.
0 kommentar(er)
