Digital Cultures and New Media
17.07.2020
Interpreting Cyborgs.
A cyborg is an entity which is hybrid in nature made of both organic material and technology. Feminists have used the metaphor of cyborg to challenge the patriarchy where the presumed notion of determining a person’s gender is through their physical body. They have emphasized the concept of cyborg as liberatory because in order to break the inequality between the genders, one can escape bodied gender itself and a cyborg defies such boundaries. This idea is reflected in the final line of Donna Haraway’s essay A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century, “Though both are bound in the spiral dance, I would rather be a cyborg than a goddess” (Haraway, A Cyborg Manifesto). For Haraway cyborg becomes significant in challenging the traditional boundaries because it is neither male nor female.
Donna Haraway in her paper lays out the idea of the cyborg not necessarily the thing that actually exists in the world or as a sort of future thing that humans can be concretely working towards but is the kind of ‘material-semiotic metaphor’ that is a product of mixed physical and ideological tool for thinking what kind of future we want to bring into being. Rejecting identity markers that differentiate man from animals and animals from machine, she writes, “By the late twentieth century, our time, a mythic time, we are all chimeras, theorized and fabricated hybrids of machine and organism; in short, we are cyborgs.” (Haraway, A Cyborg Manifesto)
The first provocation of the cyborg is that human beings need to rewrite their origin starting with the origin myths from the Western heritage. The myth that there was an original pure past in a state of paradise. Letting go of the myth of the one right, one unified Edenic way of life, the idea that there is one technology, one person, one philosophy. She asserts that “cyborg politics is the struggle for language and the struggle against perfect communication, against the one code that translates all meaning perfectly, the central dogma of phallogocentrism.” (Haraway, A Cyborg Manifesto)
The cyborg for Haraway rejects the idea of original unity. She writes that “a cyborg is a creature of the post-structural world and has no truck with bisexuality, pre-oedipal symbiosis, unalienated labour. The cyborg skips the steps of the original unity of identification with nature in the Western sense.” The reason why Haraway is attracted to the metaphor of a cyborg is because of its ability to help her reconceptualise socialist feminism in a “postmodernist, non-naturalist” way. The existence of the cyborg does not depend on biological reproduction and goes beyond the Freudian mythologies that supress women. The cyborg is made up of several parts- organic material, machines and technology. It is both human and machine at the same time.
Thus the cyborg also rejects dualisms and binary oppositions that have prevailed in Western traditions and have created a rigid system of domination of women, workers, people belonging to different races etc. and all who were constituted as ‘others’ which justified Western traditions like patriarchy, colonialism, racism. Haraway states, “To recapitulate, certain dualisms have been persistent in Western traditions; they have all been systemic to the logics and practices of domination of women, people of colour, nature, workers, animals — in short, domination of all constituted as others, whose task is to mirror the self.” (Haraway, A Cyborg Manifesto)
The notion of cyborg is often used in feminist discourses and in recent times has become increasingly popular in science fiction novels and movies. Some of the popular culture science fiction films show the female cyborgs as sex objects created to serve the pleasure of their creators like Pris in Blade Runner (1982). However there are also strong, independent feminine cyborgs where feminist theories subvert Western discourse in the genre of science fiction. Haraway cites the author John Varley for constructing a “supreme cyborg in his arch-feminist exploration of Gaea,” and Octavia Butler for writing a series of novels which “interrogate reproductive, linguistic, and nuclear politics in a mythic field structured by late twentieth-century race and gender.” (Haraway, A Cyborg Manifesto)
The revision of gender boundaries in Haraway’s A Cyborg Manifesto suggests a reconstruction of identity that subverts Western traditions. This utopian dream of a ‘post-gender world’ may be countered if we turn our attention from the socialist-feminist stand to a humanist one. The problematic humanist aspects that emerges as a result of the rise of cyborgs poses an alarming threat to the society that might turn Haraway’s utopic dream into a dystopic one.
The idea of human beings being imperfect have circulated for a very long time now. There has been a debate between what human beings are and what they are supposed to be. A few years back this idea of what human beings are supposed to be was a far-fetched idea, almost a speculation. But now scientists have successfully redesigned human beings with the help of biotechnology and electronic implants into the body of an individual.
Cyborgs can also be found in the Androids that have a combination of advanced AI that might have feelings and agency. There are also real life cyborgs that exist today like Neil Harbisson, a cyborg activist who has an antenna on his head which is his cyborg implant that allows him to hear colour. He was born color-blind and the implant augments his senses. Then there is also the concept of trans-humanism that uses technology to expand human capacities of intelligence and their lifespan. However there are other aspects of cyborg that plays little role in human embodiments and bigger role in information systems.
Many individuals have already become part machine and part flesh. A technologically and genetically modified body prompts a trans-humanist vision of enhancing human potential by overcoming natural flaws like ageing and a failing body. Popular culture representations show this aspect of a flawed human body in need of improvement in films like Gattaca (1997) Alex Garland’s Ex Machina (2014), Terry Gillam’s The Zero Theorem (2013), Resident Evil (1997). For some it even becomes a utopian imagination where the self transcends itself from the prison of the body and escapes into the virtual world.
As a result the idea of what is normal is continuously changing with evolution in technical developments. Today what is considered as mere additions to a body to enhance the body’s activities will be considered as an integral component of the body in future. A few years later humankind may simply disappear and give rise to a new species. The image of Darth Vader in the Star War movies (1977-2005) and films like Blade Runner, The Matrix provide a dystopian view of the cyborgs who are depicted as violent and dangerous with a complete disdain of their creators, the humans who are a weak species to them. These films show a conflict between the two species that lead to a crisis and eventually a victory over mankind.
This leads to a discussion of how the future might be and who will wield power and control. Perhaps humans will not disappear but will simply evolve in the new form of cyborgs. With technological innovation, the evolution of the human species have been rapidly transitioning to become human-cyborgs. The vision of the not so distant future, where the boundaries between man and machine are blurred leads to the construction of a new species. Cyborgs contribute to the questioning of the boundaries and the hierarchization set by man between the human/non-human, human/machine and human/inhuman.
The idea of compassion and emotion, again is synonymous to human which is why we term people devoid of compassion as inhuman. In the current situation where humankind is
designed to make it more compatible with machines, what does it mean to be human? The problem comes to the fore as to what would happen to mankind without their emotions? Would the redesigned species be more intelligent and less emotional or would mankind be completely erased and replaced by another species? In discussing the concept of cyborg from various aspects and perspectives, I think these questions need much consideration.
References
Haraway, Donna. A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century. Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature. New York: Routledge, 1991. Pp- 149-181.
Wittes, Benjamin and Jane Chong. Our Cyborg Future: Law and Policy Implications. Brookings. 2014. https://www.brookings.edu/research/our-cyborg-future-law-and-policy-implications/ Accessed July 16 2020.
