Definition of Cyborg and Overview
When defining a cyborg, one has to understand that as a metaphor, a cyborg cannot be bound by singular descriptions founded on natural truths. Defining a cyborg should take into consideration the fact that it should not fit within the ancient western mythologies since it is not made of earth and will never return to it. Therefore, since the cyborg is outside of this structure, it is either gender neutral or genderless altogether. It should not crave for parental love or have the urge to be completed by a mate.
Therefore, a cyborg refers to a fictitious and cybernetic organism that is a blending of machine and organism features, which is a creature of fiction as well as social reality (Kirkup, 2000, p. 123). A cyborg is also a being that has both human and machine capabilities, nerves and wires, and biological features as well as machinery make up. However, our essay uses the term Cyborg metaphorically to refer to the technological advancements, for instances the internet, electric trains, interlinked channels of communication between corporations located in different parts of the world among other technologies. Up to recently, the Cyborg has become a staple of science and fiction and this is likely to last for centuries to come because of technological advancements and human dependence on technology to perform simple tasks that were previously completed using manual labor.
In addition, the paper will highlight Donna Haraway’s Cyborg Manifesto which is about lived and fictitious experiences of women during the late 20th century. The context of the author’s work is during Ronald Reagan years, and the political and economic push for techno science development and its cultural impact. Therefore, the author highlights the boundary between social reality and science fiction in relation to feminism. Donna Haraway argues Cyborgs are a manifestation of our fictitious social and bodily reality. She states that as at the onset of the 20th century, our mythic time has come to demonstrate that all of the human races are chimeras, fabricated and theorized hybrids of organism and machine. Our minds are designed to use tools but we rely on technology thus we free our minds to think differently. An example is our dependence on computers for typing instead of hand writing. Therefore, we are Cyborgs by nature. That is we are a condensed image of both material reality and imagination transforming the relation between machine and organisms into a border war.
Origin of the Cyborg
Before the onset of the Second World War, the concept of a man-machine blending was widespread across the scientific community. Allan Poe is documented to have created the story titled ‘The Man That was Used Up’ as early as 1843. Others who shared similar ideas of a half human and half machine being include Jean De La Hire in his 1908 Nyctalope publication, Hamilton Edmond in his 1928 novel ‘The Comet Doom,’ about space explorers. By 1960, Nathan Kline and Manfred Clynes coined the term Cyborg to refer to an enhanced being capable of surviving extraterrestrial environments. They were inspired by their belief that there was a need for man to develop an intimate relationship with machines. Their inspiration was drawn largely from the fact that the 1960s witnessed increased space exploration activities by the USSR and the United States of America (Zylinska, 2002, p. 39). According to Donna Haraway, in the western sense, Cyborgs do not have an origin story. But it can be pointed out that Cyborgs probably originated from two lines of history. The first is in May Shelly’s Frankstein monster that was not born but was assembled from operating tables. The other line is that the Cyborg character has its origin in the cybernetics field that became prominent during the 1960s because of space exploration activities and the cold war. From the above stories we have two dominant Cyborgs, the first a Cyborg as a machine controlled monster and the second the Cyborg as a re-conceptualized post-human body. The question remains if Cyborgs can act like humans, how do they give birth? Heims explains that Cyborgs replicate through their psyches that long to perpetuate by conceiving replicas through unique ideas and by nurturing awareness in our minds using movies such as the Terminator. Cyborg sex is more comparable to the replicative baroque of invertebrates such as ferns that represents a perfect organic prophylactic against the heterosexism that we are used to (Haney, 2006, p. 64). In essence, Cyborg replication is different from organic reproduction. For example, the modern wars witnessed during the late 20th century reflect the characteristics of Cyborgs. For instance, the U.S defense system is coded based on command-control-communication-intelligence abbreviated as C3I. This defense system is a fictitious one since it is not natural. The system maps our bodily and social reality. The first documented Cyborg was the case of a lab rat conceived as an experimental program at New York’s Rockland State Hospital 50 years ago. It was implanted with an osmotic pump to regulate doses of chemicals that altered its physiological parameters.
How we become transformed by Cyborgs
As mentioned earlier, the concept of the Cyborg is used metaphorically to illustrate how our lives have become dependent on technological advancements. These technologies now control every aspects of our lives, for instance how we socialize and communicate over distances, how we travel, and even how we carry out duties at our places of work. Most recently as at the onset of the millennium, we have undergone a digital revolution with the expansion of the internet broadband which in itself is a Cyborg replicating rapidly.
An example of how we are becoming transformed is seen in the case of the social media such as Facebook and twitter that helped to topple dictatorial regimes in the Middle East recently. The Arab uprisings in Libya, Tunisia, Egypt and Syria were facilitated by the possibilities of sharing data instantly in the form of status updates that called for regime change. Such political, social and economic issues that are discussed online spark ideas and lead the majority to participate in airing their views at the same time thus creating an ‘e-society’ that understands itself differently compared to the mediocre intelligence of the masses during the past before the Cyborg came. This newer form of understanding self is called electronic consciousness.
How understanding the concept of the Cyborg can enlighten Women
The socialist feminism theory, also known as materialist feminism has its roots engrained in Marxism. The theory postulates that the liberation of women will only be achieved by putting effort towards ending the root causes of women’s oppression, the major causes for the oppression that have been highlighted by Donna Haraway are cultural forces, that is class and gender, in addition to economic forces that encompasses patriarchal systems of capitalism. Further evidence of the author’s description of socialist feminism is seen where she describes a cyborg as an illegitimate offspring of patriarchal capitalism, militarism, and state socialism. While these writing were made during Reagan’s era, presently they resonate with today’s internet technology whose origin can be traced back to the U.S military that built the network structure for safer communication (Toffoletti, 2007, p. 116). The internet symbolizes our society’s networks, and its parallels of organism and machine. Guattari and Deleuze describe a network form called Rhizome whose edges contain nodes. The two authors use the example of illegitimate off springs that are likely to be exceedingly unfaithful to their origins because their fathers are inessential to their lives. Similarly, it can be said that rhizome network structures like the internet are used in ways that are unfaithful to their intended purpose by the military. Therefore, it is this idea of an unfaithful cyborg that simultaneously liberates socialist feminists against a patriarchal system of capitalism. Therefore, the cyborg is presently threatening the long held structured ways of understanding our universe as it opposes boundaries between machine and organism, human and animal, and lastly the physical and non-physical. The oppositions can be clearly seen in advancements made each day in the medical field. For instance, through xenotransplants, that is the use of animal organs during human operations, application of nanotechnology for transhumanist and medical means, the psychological study of organisms to explain human behavior and the formulation of scientific theories such as quantum mechanics, which brings closer the immaterial and the material.
Do We Have a Choice of What We Become?
Technological determinism if not checked may lead to the destruction of humanity in the near future. This is because unchecked artificial intelligence may take over the control of crucial sectors such as defense as seen in the movie Resident Evil 4 and cause nuclear war. Cyborgs can be dangerous because in the same way they have built networks of affinities characterized as not having beginning nor ending, they also represent networks of communication that may exert control and lack beginning nor ending (Haney, 2006, p. 73). As Cyborgs, we should quickly find a way to guarantee our survival by ensuring our amalgamation with machines. Such fusions help to alter, enhance and adapt our bodies to the ever changing environment.
We do have a choice of what we would want to become in the future. Haraway proposes informatics of domination as the way forward to merge modern biotechnologies with communication technologies towards a single purpose. She elaborates further that informatics of domination is the translation of the world to focus on coding problems with the aim of creating a common language where all resistance to instrumental control disappears. However, the cyborg metaphor is grounded towards a movement that is against informatics of domination. Haraway argues that cyborg politics entails the struggle against perfect communication, which is against the informatics of domination that translates all meaning perfectly. Haraway’s chart shown below illustrates the shifts between the traditional hierarchical dominations and the scary newer networks she refers to as informatics of domination:
The above chart shows the major rearrangements over the past sixty years from traditional perspectives towards what is considered modern.
Post-modern human refers to a collective entity that constitutes a whole system when all its multifarious segments work in harmony and symbiotically. This pluralistic entity exists in the contemporary world where it is impossible to garner absolute knowledge about matter. This is because absolute knowledge is dependent on truth which does not exist in our contemporary world since our culture; reality and information are socially created and agreed upon communally. Therefore, the cyborg metaphor simply refers to us pluralistic individuals with various social roles to play, personas, ethnic and cultural ties (Rajguru, 2012, p. 4). Therefore, since the cyborg is outside of this structure, it is either gender neutral or genderless altogether. It should not crave for parental love or have the urge to be completed by a mate. For our transition into the future to run smoothly, the cyborg which now constitutes part of our nuclear technology, medical technology, Internet technology, Artificial intelligence, weapon engineering, and agricultural has to work in harmony and symbiotically with all parts that constitute it. Consequently, boundary breakdowns must take place. The first is between human and animal. Contemporary evolutionary-ideologies such as biological-determinism place humans and animals in the realm of objects of knowledge. Increased animal rights activism and emergence of affinity within feminist culture towards living things have helped to breakdown the distinction between animals and humans. Advancements that blend human/animal tissue together during surgeries are attributed also to the breakdown of the boundary and consequently the fusion of human and animal.
The second breakdown is between machine and animal-human (organism). The late 20th century technological advancements have blurred the boundaries that existed previously between organism and machine. This is because some technologies have the ability to mimic our capabilities and personalities, while some even surpass our abilities. Therefore, the cyborg subverts what counts as natural since it blurs boundaries between what is natural and artificial. The third breakdown of boundaries is the blurring of the non-physical and the physical. Miniaturization of electronics and nano-technologies has seen the emergence undetectable and invisible technologies such as electromagnetic waves and electronic signals that are scattered everywhere. When these boundaries are broken, the greater cyborg will work harmoniously.
How Would It Be Without the Technical Things We Have Today?
Our societies have increasingly become dependent on technology. This close relation constitutes part of the larger cyborg. The fact remains it would be a difficult transition for the society to shift back to ancient ways when advanced technology was not in place. If the technical things we have today were not in place, today’s world would be chaotic. Humans would still be primitive and the time taken on performing simple tasks that are presently automated would last hours if not days and weeks. Chaos such as fighting and killing each other over limited resources would be the order of the day. This is because the lack of artificial intelligence disorients humans (Clark, 2003, p. 47). The lack of an efficient way of communication in the absence of today’s advancements would return us back to the dark ages when the great thinkers of those days were persecuted for going against religious myths. Majority of us would succumb to death because of diseases that are presently curable thanks to medical advancements that metaphorically are part of the greater cyborg. It would be difficult for us to endure the hot summers without air conditioning and the cold winters without electric heating of our houses. It would be impossible to trade perishable goods over long distances because of the lack of an efficient transport system such as electric trains and aircraft that constitute the larger Cyborg. Therefore, the transition towards adapting to a world without the technical things we are used to currently will be difficult and painful. For instance, almost every field relies on electricity energy, for instance medical institutions, manufacturing firms, the financial markets in different regions of the world that trade at different times. If electric power was to fail completely, massive losses would be incurred in the form of death, property and finances.
Conclusion
Concisely, we have defined a Cyborg as a creation that is characterized as having both human and machine capabilities. As discussed earlier on, the origin of the term and its meaning can be traced back to the mid 19th century. Donna Haraway’s Cyborg Manifesto tries to direct women towards embracing the idea of we are all Cyborgs to liberate them from oppression. Metaphorically, we have used the term Cyborg to refer to the advancements in technology that are continued to be witnessed in various field presently. These fields are all interlinked and dependent on each other thanks to the Cyborg (Clark, 2003, p. 29). For instance, advancements in artificial intelligence that is currently set to power Google’s driverless car, advancements in the medical field that has led to the blending of animal and human tissues to treat previously incurable diseases, and in the process breaking the boundary between human and animal, automated transport system such as electric train network that connects various cities. The Cyborg has made it possible for us humans to co-exist peacefully and comfortably. Without the Cyborg, the world would be chaotic and suffering would be the order of the day. Anarchy that characterized the dark ages due to ignorance of the masses would engulf most of us since platforms for communication such as social media that help to educate masses quickly would not be in place.
Reference list
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