Chris Hables Gray, Ph.D.

Praxis
I don't call myself an artist. I am an activist first and an academic second. Art doesn't enter into it except that I think about art, and manipulate/produce images, all the time. When I became a graduate student after ten years as a political organizer and began studying how technology changes war I realized that much of the material I was studying was images: advertisements for weapons, pictures from combat, science-fiction imaginings of future soldiers. One can write about images of course, and I do. But for me it wasn't enough. So I started collecting them and then I began putting them into collages in the most low-technology way possible: xerox, scissors, tape folded over on the back. Sometimes I'd clean up xerox copies of the final image with white-out. Sometimes not. I had no plans for these images at first. But by the time I was finishing my doctorate in the History of Consciousness Board of Studies at the University of California at Santa Cruz I felt that somehow these collages were an integral part of my analysis of postmodern war. So with some money left over from a research collective I was in I printed up two versions of my dissertation. One, the vanilla "official" version had only a few military charts in it; the other version was full of cartoons, cut-outs, and my collages. It represented the whole of my analysis. You can talk about technology and war and the integration of humans into man-machine weapon systems but "words turn back" from some truths that images, especially juxtaposed images for me, can construct. Meaning (truth as far as I am concerned) can sometimes exists in forms that language cannot directly access. Maybe this is what some people call art.

Cyborgization is a central theme of postmodern war and it has become a major focus of all my work. Looking back at the images I have constructed I can see that I am constantly exploring the shifting boundaries between organic and machinic, between past/present/future, on the border of ground/foreground and between human and other. Military bureaucrats, soldiers in protection suits, Greek statues and SF graphics combine in Heads for example. A statue of the mother goddess is the background for a baby with prosthesis, an astronaut, Don Quixote, a military biowar squad, and various robots in Goddess Statue. Pilots from World War II, Vietnam, the present and the R&D future are slapped on top of the destroyed Hiroshima in Pilots and their work.

In the very first collage I did, Metropolis, the robot Eve divides a dead World War I soldier on the wire in no-man's land while shuttles blast off to either side and satellite eyes watch dispassionately.

I felt these images were part of my work and from the beginning I tried to get them published along with my words in articles and books. And I had some success, as is detailed below. Some of them also ended up being very useful as icons and images for the web site for Cyborg Citizen. But only lately have I thought about what lies behind them. In many ways they reprise Many of the basic aspects of postmodernity generally and cyborgs in particular: proliferation, compromised boundaries, and information intensity. Beyond these congruences, two major points have occurred to me that seem to deserve some discussion:

Cyborg Epistemology: In 1995 Steven Mentor, Heidi Figueroa-Sarriera and I proposed a cyborg epistemology in our article "Cyborgology". We wanted to keep the dynamism of the traditional dialectic and yet go beyond the binary/dualistic framework it is trapped in. Reality isn't just action and reaction, it is lumpy, we argued. It is therefore bricollage.

So we said a cyborg epistemology is: "Thesis, antithesis, synthesis, prosthesis. And again." The order doesn't matter. Prostheses can be attached at any stage, and lead to their own dialectical interactions. And theses are multiple, as are antitheses. And more than one synthesis can come out of a thesis-antithesis dance. Much of reality is just too complicated for simplicity, in words or images.

Prosthesis/Bricollage/Morph: When I was telling Steven Mentor about this issue he exclaimed "Don't forget morphing... it's the hot thing now, not bricollage." My first reaction was "fuck the hot thing, philosophy isn't about trends." But that was a knee-jerk reaction. Actually, when lots of people get excited about a new idea it is important, although not always in the way most of them think. The trope/genre/technology of morphing is important. It is, actually, bricollage over time. It is the cyborg epistemology made digital. A good collage is often multi-temporal; it gathers different times together at one point. What was, what is, and what may be can all co-exist in a collage. We humans

In the last 15 years I have constructed only 20 collage images. Ten have been published in some form and those are the ones included here.Where they were used, and the texts (if any) that they were published with, are noted. Most of the other images just didn't work. I spent many hours cutting out very colorful pictures of sex toys, for example, and made two collages with them. But somehow they didn't say what I was trying to say and now I can't even find the unsatisfying originals.

So, cyborgs and bricollage and theory with little articulation. Words
turn back, let the images speak for themselves.

Collages
(fig. 1) Heads Collage (In Gray 1991, Gray 2000, Icon for Chapter 14,
Posthuman Politics, Cyborg Citizen web site:
http://www.routledge-ny.com/CyborgCitizen)

War heads make up this collage of warriors, from Greek goddess to futuristic cybersoldier, the face of war has changed incredibly, but it still fundamentally is something that starts in someone's head and ends up impacting someone's body. The problem with Postmodern War is that it has the technological potential not only to generate startling new "war heads" but some of them have the power to actually blow them all, blow us, completely away. (Text from an unsuccessful grant application, 1998.)

(fig. 2) Goddess Statue (Icon for Chapter 6, "Cybernetic Human
Reproduction", Cyborg Citizen web site:
http://www.routledge-ny.com/CyborgCitizen)

(fig. 3) "War" Collage" (Gray 1991)

Armies were the first machines according to the historian Lewis Mumford. Perhaps. What is undeniable is that the tension of mass armies and individual deaths remains central to war. What makes it particularly compelling in Postmodern War is that technology now allows for the mass slaughter of mass armies (and civilians as well) and that the mechanization of the soldier has gone to a whole new level with internal modifications and intimate external connections to machines. (Text from an unsuccessful grant application, 1998.)

(fig. 4) "Pilots and their Work" (Gray 1991, Gray 2000)

'That's Darth Vader', my 9-year-old son insisted pointing to a pilot in his respirator. I denied it, but I'm really not so sure. Death stars raining death from above, the dark side of the force (science and technology), cyborg warriors who kill from afar. It sounds like contemporary war. The pictures in this collage are all real. So, in some twisted way, is Darth Vader. (Text from Gray 2000, p. 280)

(fig. 5) "The Cyborg Body Politic" (Gray/Mentor 1995a and 1995b, Gray 2001,
and as the icon for "Chapter 1 The Cyborg Body Politic", Cyborg Citizen web
site: http://www.routledge-ny.com/CyborgCitizen)

Here I have reworked part of the front piece illustration for Leviathan by Thomas Hobbes., which is also pictured. Leviathan is itself a cyborg creature made up of many people (fig. 6). The idea is an old one, going back at least to Aristotle. The postmodern nation-state isn't just people, of course. It includes a whole range of technologies including laws, bureaucracies, and many different types of machines, especially computers. Citizens are cyborg citizens now, and territory is infrastructure. (Text from Gray 2001, figure 3, after p. 111)

Bibliography
Gray, Chris Hables
(1991)Computers as Weapons and Metaphors: The U.S. Military
1940-1990 and Postmodern War. Available from UMI, 300 North Zeeb Rd., Ann
Arbor, MI 48106. Graphics only in non-vanilla version, Silicon Valley
Research Group Working Paper.
(1992) "Excerpts From Philosophy and the Human Future: The
Implications of Postmodern War," Nomad, no. 1, Spring, pp. 31-9.
(1997) Postmodern War: The New Politics of Conflict, New York:
Guilford Publications; London: Routledge Press. (Paperback printing 1998.)
(2000) "Manplus: Enhanced Cyborgs and the Construction of the
Future Masculine," Science as Culture, vol. 9, no. 3, September, pp.
277-300.
(2001) Cyborg Citizen, London/New York: Routledge Press.

With Steven Mentor
(1995a) "The Cyborg Body Politic: Leviathan Meets the New World
Order" in Prosthetic Territories: Politics and Culture, Mark Driscoll and
Gabriel Baum, eds., Colorado Spring, Co.: Westview Press. pp. 219-47.
(1995b) "The Cyborg Body Politic: 1.2" in The Cyborg Handbook, C.
Gray, H. Figueroa-Sarriera, and S.Mentor, eds., NY: Routledge Press, pp.
449-62, 1995.

With Steven Mentor and Heidi Figueroa-Sarriera
(1995) The Cyborg Handbook, C. Gray, H. Figueroa-Sarriera, and S.
Mentor, eds., NY: Routledge Press, pp. 1-14.
(1995) "Cyborgology: An Introduction" in The Cyborg Handbook, C.
Gray, H. Figueroa-Sarriera, and S. Mentor, eds., NY: Routledge Press, pp.
1-14.

August 28, 2001