Schizophrenics & Cyborgs: Interrogating 'Posthuman(Ist)' Subjectivity (Critical Essay‪)‬

The schizophrenic and the cyborg are postmodern icons who made their respective debuts in the Anglo-American academy via two seminal articles of the mid-1980s: Fredric Jameson's 'Postmodernism, or The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism' and Donna Haraway's 'A Manifesto for Cyborgs: Science, Technology and Socialist Feminism in the 1980s'. Each pushes the boundaries of subjectivity beyond our familiar binary oppositions of self/other, sane/insane, human/machine; the schizophrenic as a metaphor for radically and irreconcilably fragmented subjectivity, the cyborg as a synthetic hybrid of organism and machine. By interrogating Jameson and Haraway's analyses of the postmodern and its crises, this article proposes a critical re-evaluation of the schizophrenic and the cyborg as models for contemporary subjectivity. 'Subjects' were once synonymous with self-determining human beings. Today the term is widely used in the humanities to indicate that selfhood is not an expression of a fixed or original human nature, rather, as a function of specific historical and cultural contexts, it is constantly 'in process'. The construction and deconstruction of the subject, its relationship to a radical politics, and its permutations in postmodernity are all important topics in contemporary critical theory. (2) Two canonical Marxist/Socialist analyses of the postmodern, published in the mid-1980s, continue to influence debates about new forms of subjectivity: Fredric Jameson's 'Postmodernism, or The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism', (3) and Donna Haraway's 'A Manifesto for Cyborgs: Science, Technology and Socialist Feminism in the 1980s'. (4) Jameson and Haraway invest previously peripheral figures with a potent symbolic function: the schizophrenic (5) and the cyborg (6) are heralded as exemplary postmodern subjects. Both articles have been widely anthologised as key contributions to contemporary critical theory, but despite their overlapping concerns, Jameson and Haraway have not been construed as interlocutors. Similarly, the schizophrenic and the cyborg are concepts well circulated in cultural studies but seldom, if ever, critically compared. This article confronts the conceptual boundary separating the schizophrenic and the cyborg by examining what is at stake in Jameson and Haraway's visions of posthuman(ist) subjectivity: What 'crisis' demands that modern subjectivity be reconceptualised? What political possibilities are imagined through the schizophrenic and the cyborg? Can we conceive of a relationship between them? Finally, how can such an analysis prompt us to re-evaluate the significance and efficacy of boundaries in the representation of postmodern subjectivity?