[T]he boy began to delight in his daring flight, and abandoning his guide, drawn by desire for the heavens, soared higher. His nearness to the devouring sun softened the fragrant wax that held the wings: and the wax melted: he flailed with bare arms, but…could not ride the air. Even as his mouth was crying his father’s name, it vanished into the dark blue sea, the Icarian Sea, called after him. The unhappy father, now no longer a father…caught sight of the feathers on the waves, and cursed his inventions. (Ovid, Metamorphosis)
And they said one to another, “Go to, let us build a city and a tower, whose top may reach unto heaven; and let us make us a name, lest we be scattered abroad upon the face of the earth….” And the Lord said, “Behold, the people is one, and they have all one language…and now nothing will be restrained from them, which they have imagined to do.” (King James, Gen 11: 4-6)
The desire to transcend limitations marks human beings, as the quotation from Ovid demonstrates; young Icarus did not take the middle course, neither too high nor too low, and in his excess flew too high to the sun. His father, the master-crafter Daedalus, fashioned wings for their escape from Crete and its tyrannical ruler, King Minos. This myth speaks to the intersection of human limitation, technology, and the transcendence that it makes possible, but also to the pressing need for vigilance in the exercise of that new power. The Tower of Babel gets built through the technology of a common language, through massive participation; when God recognizes the human pride motivating it, he destroys the Tower, the universal language, the concord. New media poetics, as I argue in this dissertation, currently may be viewed neither in the detached wings fashioned by Daedalus nor in the ruin of the waves; neither in the participation of building the city nor in the discord that follows: new media poetics shapes a “desire for heaven” in the form of unlimited memory, a necessary component of the Cyborg dream.[1] Haraway’s work resonates with this intersection of The Tower of Babel and the cyborg, and she anticipates the next chapter’s discussion of the labyrinth with she writes, “Cyborg imagery can suggest a way out of the maze of dualisms in which we have explained our bodies and our tools to ourselves. This is a dream not of a common language, but of a powerful infidel heteroglossia” (181)
[1] Here Haraway’s notion of the cyborg—and the dream it brings about—echoes this cluster of cooperation, universal language, and transcendence: “This is a dream not of a common language, but of a powerful infidel heteroglossia” (181). In other words, the cyborg embraces what Burke may term the “impieties” of many voices.
Aaron
Jason Thompson