DMCT Week 5

Ah, cyborgs. Haraway's influential essay "The Cyborg Manifesto" offers a unique perspective on the changing conditions in late modernity. As civilization progresses, it has become clear that machines and humans are interacting in ways as never before and as such, we are all cyborgs at this point. We all interact with technology and media on a daily basis. Haraway argues that cyborgs operate through irony, and that irony is "a rhetorical strategy and a political method" (272). It is through the cyborg that we understand the world. The cyborg is our ontology.

Haraway's argument rests on the deconstruction of traditional binaries. She points to the erosion between human/animal, organism/machine, and physical/non-physical binaries as signals of a shift from patriarchal and gender norms. I want to specifically mention a separate binary that has also been eroded during the dawn of postmodernity; the binary of information and entertainment. Standing at the center of this deconstruction of a traditional binary are the two TV programs The Daily Show (TDS) and The Colbert Report (TCR).

Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert run their fake news operations out of Comedy Central. Their two programs critique media, politics, and religion (among numerous other things) through ironic, parodic and satiric humor. I argue that Stewart and Colbert are the epitome of the cyborg political movement, seeing the political struggle from both sides of the aisle at the same time because "each reveals both dominations and possibilities unimaginable from the other vantage point" (Haraway, 276). Colbert spot-on parody of conservative commentators has led some to believe that he is promoting a conservative agenda, while others maintain he is a liberal. Although more outspokenly liberal, Stewart often takes stabs at President Obama, the liberals in the Senate or ridiculous liberal policies set in place at a state level, while also taking the conservatives to task on a regular basis.

This is then the working thesis of my paper for the semester. I want to examine TDS and TCR as cyborgs (including the critiques of the cyborg manifesto). I want to look specifically at the rhetorical and technological techniques engaged by the show (redacted video, interviewing, cross-editing, mock journalism, satire, parody, irony) and show how they are engaging the audience in a cyborg's view of contemporary media and politics and how both programs promote the cyborg agenda.

Long live the new flesh!