Note on this edition: this is an electronic version of the 1999 book ...

Technodemons of the Digital Self 209In this cyborg fiction, body as an “other” is figuratively linked with machineas potential threat to the self. The Man Plus project attempts to build a supermanwho is capable of exceeding the limits of the biological body: itwould be stronger, and not covered with vulnerable, soft human tissue. Asnarrative progresses, the technological supplement of Man Plus threatens todisplace the “original” – Torraway is even castrated to attain the standards ofmachine-like invulnerability. 14 Following the supplementary logic, the “plus”not only adds something to the “man,” but replaces it. 15 Klaus Theweleit’spsychoanalytic interpretations of the “armoured” body in Freikorps novelsoffers some suggestions about the motivations for such ambivalent gestures.The denial of sexuality and living, feeling contact (inherent in man-machinefantasies) signals the traumatic need to control instinctual impulses, to armourone’s ego by armouring the body. 16The fear of robots is such a strong trend in SF that Isaac Asimov haseven coined a term for it, the “Frankenstein complex.” In his own short stories,Asimov set out to alleviate this anxiety. 17 Many of his popular robotstories revolve around crime and guilt, and only humans are proven to becapable of evil acts. The robots in Asimov stories are incapable of unethicalactions – because they are programmed by humans to follow compulsivelyevery command a human gives, even if that would mean a robot’s own destruction.18 Asimov actually retains the distinct identities of man and machineby emphasising the inequality and dissimilar problems of robots andtheir creators. For example, the classic story “The Bicentennial Man” (1976),that Asimov later expanded into novel (The Positronic Man, 1992, withRobert Silverberg), aims to cross the line separating humans and machines(robots), but in so doing only substantiates the significance of this limit forthe construction of identity. The individual robot, “Andrew Martin,” possessescreativity and struggles for recognition of his humanity in a mannerreminiscent of the civil rights movement of the 1960s. In a self-defeatingact, the robot can reach this recognition only by replacing his body with anorganic human body, and by letting his brains deteriorate and die in thebecause he knew that his fingers were slowly and delicately wrapping themselves arounda chunk of limonite the size of a baseball.” (Ibid., 266.) The fear of evil intentions is projectedinto the malevolence of treacherous machinery.14 Ibid., 117.15 See Derrida 1967/1976, 145.16 Theweleit 1989, 162-64, 210-25.17 “The Myth of the Machine,” 1978 (Asimov 1983, 162). See also Brian Stableford,“Man and Machine” (in Wingrove 1984, 26).18Asimov formulated the “three laws of robotics,” a set of built-in commands that oftenpreface his robot story collections: 1. A robot may not injure a human being, or,through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm; 2. A robot must obey the ordersgiven it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law; 3.A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict withthe First or Second Law.