Cyborgs: An Interpretation of the Human and Non-human Aspects of Material and Social Existence
A ‘cyborg’ is a cybernetic organism, one that traverses and negotiates the sphere of social reality, by way of lived social relations, as well that of fiction. Donna Haraway, in her celebrated work, the “Cyborg Manifesto”, composed in the year 1986, uses the image of the cyborg as the anchoring metaphor for her essay. She describes the cyborg as an integrated system, a hybrid between a machine and a human organism. If cybernetics entails the study of communication and processes of control in the realm of biological, mechanical and electronic systems, a cybernetic organism then, it can safely be assumed, is one that functions within a controlled network of communication. Further, the status of the cyborg as a hybrid entity, presupposed it’s genetic dissimilarity from its parents or stock. That which is a hybrid between a living organism and a machine, would physiologically possess both organic and inorganic materials. In other words, a cyborg can be considered to be both living and non-living at the same time. Haraway denounces the discreteness of these demarcations. Instead, she treats them as co-determinate. She argues that, philosophically, there exists no real distinction between fiction and the lived social reality, since each category tends to impinge on the other, thereby, redefining and refining the ‘other’ continually. She also contends that cyborgs can no longer be considered to be things of the future. Modern day medical practices, reproduction, manufacturing and warfare schemes have hitherto incorporated the use of cyborgs. Cyborgs have also become a common feature on social media platforms like Twitter. After a human individual sets up their Twitter account, they may activate automated programs to post tweets on their behalf, during their absence. Cyborgs, as bot assisted humans or human assisted bots, interweave mental and functional abilities of both humans and bots.
“The question then arises as to what exactly is and isn’t a Cyborg. Some could regard a blind man with his cane (Bateson 1972) as a Cyborg, the cane feeding important information on the local environment, to the man. Meanwhile a hearing aid for a deaf person or even a pair of worn glasses could come into the same category. More recently some researchers in the field of wearable computers have become self-professed cyborgs (Pentland 1998).”
(Warwick 2003, 131)
Technology, according to Warwick, has been employed to enhance normal functioning of the human body. In his study, Cyborg Morals, Cyborg Values, Cyborg Ethics (2003), Warwick recognises the ethical dilemma that it poses in modifying the individual’s consciousness by merging the human and the machine, which extend far beyond the physical enhancements and repairs. The linking of technology with the human brain and its extended nervous system, also presupposes an altered mental functioning of the reconstructed individual, which not only has a far reaching impact on the nature of the individual, but also influences and compromises its autonomy. In wearing a pair of spectacles, with or without an inbuilt computer, the individual’s autonomy is retained. However, when the human nervous system is connected to a computer, it’s sense of individuality and consciousness becomes questionable.
Donna Haraway, who identifies herself as a socialist feminist, dedicated her Manifesto to the cause of the radical feminist movement, a theoretical component of “second wave” activism, which had gained popularity, both in United States and Europe, during the 1970’s and 1980’s, in an attempt to analyse the root causes of gender oppression. The Manifesto was a directed opposition towards the “Goddess feminism” movement, which stood out as an American attempt to reject technological influences in social lives of it population in order to re-embed women into the natural environment. This movement, according to Haraway, was particularly reactionary, rather than being progressive to the ongoing feminist activism. The cyborg metaphor, in this context, became far more appealing, in its perceived ability to reconceptualise the socialist feminist movement in a “postmodernist, non-naturalist” mode. Since the cyborg does not depend on human reproduction for its emergence or existence, it remains outside the duality posed by gender norms. The cyborg, in Haraway’s imagination, is no Frankenstein, waiting to be saved by a paternal figure, nor does it seek closure in a heterosexual soul mate. The desires of belongingness and integration into a communal family life is entirely missing in a cyborg. Most American socialists and feminists, Harraway contends, rely on the deepened dualism of mind/body, animal/machine and idealism/materialism in their formulation of contemporary culture. She regards the perception of dualism as inimical in its extreme form. High-tech cultures pose a threat to such dualistic tendencies, in their inability to determine ‘who makes’ (the influencer) and ‘who is made’ (the influenced) in the relation between humans and machines.Much in the same vein, Haraway, strongly advocates against identity politics, in arguing that there is nothing essential about being a ‘female’ that would naturally bind all women and reduce them to a set of commonalities. Feminists, in her opinion, are better served when the category ‘woman’ is recognised and acknowledged to be a social heteronormative construct, whose liberation could only be actualised through the transgression of the constructed norms. A cyborg, in this regard, is a creature of the post-gender world. The utopian tradition of imagining a world without gender, while having implications of a world without genesis, also advocates the hope of a world without a determinable end. Haraway notes that feminist movements have often deployed the notion of the ‘women’s experience’ as both a fiction (accounting for human subjectivity) and a fact (lived reality) of the most crucial and political kind. Much the same way, the cyborg is expected to alter the lived experiences of women in the late twentieth century.
The multifaceted rearrangements that social relations have been subjected to, word-wide, have for the longest time been attributed to the progress in science and technology. The nuances of the ‘Informatics of Domination’ have merged biotechnology with the various communication technologies. In that, they are both structured to function like network systems relying heavily on the transmission of codes. The consequent refashioning of the biological world is cognisant with the reconfiguration of the social world, to the extent that it has become impossible to speak of social and economic transactions without resorting to the language of the network and the code. They altered social world produces new sexualities and ethnicities, just as the New Industrial Revolution, Haraway notes, reconstructs and redefines the working class worldwide. This working class has been reconstituted in two distinct ways. In the first instance, women feature significantly in its labor force, and secondly, their labour is feminised in the context of the new economy. The exploitative nature of this feminised labour perceives women as a reserve labour force recruited for servicing the male labour force. As a direct consequence of this, poverty also comes to be feminized. The intervention of new technologies, according to Haraway, lead to a labour reallocation, with profound effects on hunger and food production. It was noted, in this regard, that while women produce fifty percent of food subsistence in the world, they are systematically excluded from the benefits of high-tech commodification of food and energy crops. Further, the increased privatisation of industries, leads to the dwindling of public space for workers in the new, but growing economy. The distinctions between public and private domains are seen to disintegrate. Haraway argues that, while the industrial era allowed for the demarcations between the factory, the market, and the home in the lives of women, home work economy, and its accompanying surveillance technologies make such distinctions impossible to retain. She uses the metaphor of ‘integrated circuits’ to explain how the social political units of home, state and church operate through forms of networked communications, rather than as separate or discrete entities in the ‘earlier’ capitalist systems.
In view of the wide proliferation of cybernetic organisms within the societal plane, scholars like Gary Downey, Joseph Dumit and Sarah Williams have advocated the pressing need for instituting the field of cyborg anthropology, which attempts to achieve academic theorising alongside popular theorising in the study of cyborgs in a late capitalist world. The cultural project of cyborg anthropology examines the interplay between knowledge production, technological production, and the production of the subject, by establishing communication between the disciplines of cultural anthropology, science and technological studies. Cyborg anthropology, therefore, “…calls attention more generally to the cultural production of human distinctiveness by examining ethnographically the boundaries between humans and machines and our visions of the differences that constitute these boundaries” (Downy, Dumit & Williams 1995, 264-265). It seeks to determine how humanness is produced through machines, and the creation of an alternate world comes to be informed by the acknowledgement of radical differences with the pre-existing world.
References:
- Haraway, Donna. “A cyborg manifesto: Science, technology, and socialist-feminism in the late 20th century.” The international handbook of virtual learning environments. Springer, Dordrecht, 2006. 117-158.
- Warwick, Kevin. “Cyborg morals, cyborg values, cyborg ethics.” Ethics and information technology3 (2003): 131-137.
- Downey, Gary Lee, Joseph Dumit, and Sarah Williams. “Cyborg anthropology.” Cultural Anthropology2 (1995): 264-269.
- Kirkup, Gill, et al., eds. The gendered cyborg: A reader. Psychology Press, 2000.
- Chu, Zi, et al. “Who is tweeting on Twitter: human, bot, or cyborg?.” Proceedings of the 26th annual computer security applications conference. 2010.
- Balsamo, Anne Marie. Technologies of the gendered body: Reading cyborg women. Duke University Press, 1996.
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