The figure of the cyborg seems to be a continuation of Deleuze’s figure of the spiritual automaton. This is a concept that appears in the cinema books, but in fact the cinema books are not primarily about the cinema at all. They constitute “a taxonomy, an essay in the classification of images and signs”. At one point in his lectures Deleuze says that you can assign, for example, the people you meet, their personalities and their lives, to the different categories of his taxonomy. So there is an application to situations lived in the real world. Maybe Woodard would consider this sort of thing to belong to “pseudo-phenomenological narratives”, but I am not so sure as him that this constitutes a term of criticism. It seems to me an apt description of the intervention of the power of the false (which, don’t forget is also the power of the fake, or pseudo, given the polysemy of “faux” in French), in the disruption of the sensory-motor schema and of its chronological time. The advent and proliferation of durational time, becomings, and incommensurable cuts and leaps are only some of the consequences.
One of these durational categories is the “spiritual automaton”. The apparent contradiction in terms is explained by the attempt to describe an action (and a thought) that takes place outside the clichés and stereotypes that regiment our actions in the familiar situations of habitual experience, inside the sensori-motor scheme. The spiritual automaton is a type of awareness and action that awakes in us at the disruption of our routines and the interruption of our ordinary sensori-motor schemas, when a different sort of automaticity is needed to respond to the new situation and not just react to it. It proceeds, if you will, by an inventive upsurge of automaticity – that is to say of affects and actions ungoverned by (or even unstructured by) the category of the autonomous subject. Haraway’s cyborg is one figuration of this creative or visionary automaticity, as is Ted Friedman’s centaur, or Dreyfus and Kelly’s skilful master, and William Connolly’s seer.
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