There
are many ways I could answer that question. I might give a few
definitions—maybe the original definition proposed by Clynes and
Kline in 1960, “self-sustaining man-machine systems” (30), a more
recent one by Hess, “any
identity between machine and human or any conflation of the
machine/human boundary” (373) or any other workable formulation.
Haraway has a good one in Primate
Visions:
“the figure born of the interface of automaton and autonomy” that
exists “when two kinds of boundaries are simultaneously
problematic: 1) that between animals (or other organisms) and humans,
and 2) that between self-controlled, self-governing machines
(automatons) and organisms, especially humans (models of autonomy).”
What all of these definitions have in common is the idea of the
interface between the organic and the technological, and their
configuration into a single system. So that's a cyborg.
Very
nice, but why write about them?
A
few obvious reasons come to mind. They're fun, especially in a sexy
high-tech science-fictiony sort of way. We have cyborgs in comic
books, cyborgs in novels, cyborgs in movies, cyborgs on TV shows,
cyborgs in video games. They are a part of our popular
consciousness—part of the things we make so that we can think more
clearly about ourselves. They address our fears and uncertainties on
the one hand, and our dreams and desires on the other. Is modern life
undermining our humanity? Are we becoming more machine-like as our
machines give us increasing mastery, or the illusion of mastery, over
our physical environments? But wouldn't it be nice to be able to
access all that information out there—all that power—by letting
it stream into our brains as fast as we want at the times of our
choosing? And seriously ... At least once, haven't you wanted a laser
canon mounted to your arm? If you haven't before, you probably do
now.
We
are afraid of becoming cyborgs; we want to become cyborgs.
Relax:
you're already a cyborg.
To
many of you, I realize, this argument will be familiar, so I will not
dwell on it at length. For a more complete version of my own take on
the question, see my article in Fragments
(forthcoming as of this writing: URL
http://quod.lib.umich.edu/f/frag/).
Or for simplicity's sake, you might consider the oft-cited assertion
of Gray, Mentor, and Figueroa-Sarriera
in their introduction to the Cyborg
Handbook:
“Anyone
with an artificial organ, limb or supplement (like a pacemaker),
anyone reprogrammed to resist disease (immunized) or drugged to
think/behave/feel better (psychopharmacology) is technically a
cyborg” (2-3).
That is, if your body has been modified to either enable or improve
its functioning even in your day-to-day environment, you are no
longer a purely biological entity; you are a hybrid of biology and
technology. Alternately,
we might employ N. Katherine Hayles’ category of the metaphoric
cyborg,
a category she sees as “including the computer keyboarder joined in
a cybernetic circuit with the screen, the neurosurgeon guided by
fiber optic microscopy during an operation” (322), or in other
words anyone who temporarily links with technology to engage in an
activity that would otherwise be difficult or impossible. Or if you
would prefer, we might
consider the argument in Andy Clark's Natural
Born Cyborgs.
Clark understands cyborgs as “human-technology
symbionts: thinking and reasoning systems whose minds and selves are
spread across biological brain and non-biological circuitry” (3);
sees the mind as an intelligence distributed across both biological
and non-biological media (4) such as spoken language, print, and
electronic files; and argues that “what
blinds us tour own increasingly cyborg nature is an ancient western
prejudice—the tendency to think of the mind as so deeply special as
to be distinct from the rest of the natural order” (26). In other
words, take
any notions of purity that you ever cherished—biological, racial,
cultural—and move them to your internal recycle bin.
An
objection that one might raise to this position is that the term
cyborg
becomes so watered down as to be virtually meaningless. The objection
is reasonable and by no means hypothetical: I've encountered it from
both students and senior colleagues. My response is that the
labelling of a broad range of identities as cyborgs is not so much a
dilution of the concept cyborg
as it is a reconsideration of the category person.
I am interested in exploring the contribution of technological
elements to personal identity, or more accurately to personhood,
remaining open to the possibility that these elements are not merely
things used by
a self but rather are modular components of
a self. Identity in other words may be modular, and I am interested
in thinking about how the modules fit together.
But
my purpose in this blog is not to prove that we are all cyborgs.
Rather, it is to consider, in a format different from the world of
academic conferences and journals on the one hand and from the
classroom on the other hand, what it means to be a cyborg.
This is the main question I want to explore in these meditations, and
in doing so, I intend to range across a fairly heterogeneous array of
material, including but not limited to science and technology
studies, Western and Eastern philosophy, literature, mythology, pop
culture, and personal reflection. Some posts will be more or less
academic; others may look like diary entries; some will be a hybrid
of the two. There is nothing like a concrete agenda as the blog will
not merely be a record of thought so much as a vehicle for it. That's
a fancy way of saying that I'm making this up as I go. So whoever you
are who find this, I hope you stick around for a while. I hope you
share some of your own thoughts. And I hope you enjoy it.
Works
Cited
Clark,
Andy. Natural Born
Cyborgs: Minds,
Technologies, and the Future of Human Intelligence.
Oxford. Oxford U.P., 2003.
Clynes, Manfred E. and
Nathan S. Kline. “Cyborgs and Space.” The Cyborg Handbook.
Ed. Chris Hables Gray. New York and London: Routledge, 1995. 29-34.
Rpt. from Astronautics (Sept. 1960): 26-27, 74-75.
Gray,
Chris Hables, Steven Mentor, and Heidi J. Figueroa-Sarriera.
“Cyborgology: Constructing the Knowledge of Cybernetic Organisms.”
The
Cyborg Handbook.
Ed. Chris Hables Gray. New York and London: Routledge, 1995. 1-14.
Haraway,
Donna. Primate Visions: Gender, Race,
and Nature in the World of Modern Science.
New York and London: Routledge, 1989.
Hayles,
N. Katherine. “The Life Cycle of Cyborgs: Writing the Posthuman.”
The Cyborg Handbook. Ed. Chris Hables Gray. New York and
London: Routledge, 1995. 321-35. Rpt. from A Question of Identity.
Ed. Marina Benjamin. Rutgers U P, 1993.
Hess,
David J. “On Low-Tech Cyborgs.” The
Cyborg Handbook. Ed. Chris Hables
Gray. New York and London: Routledge, 1995. 371-77.
Wilkie,
Rodger. “Epic Hero as Cyborg: An Experiment in Interpreting
Pre-Modern Heroic Narrative,” Fragments
2 (2012). http://quod.lib.umich.edu/f/frag.
