Difference between revisions of "What is a Cyborg?"
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| + | Harway on Cyborg Anthropology, Human-Machine Relations, and Racism | ||
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| + | Cyborgs among Us: Bodies and Hypertext | ||
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| + | Diane Greco, Program in the History and Social Study of Science and Technology, Massachusetts Institute of Technology | ||
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| + | [This essay appeared originally in Hypertext '96: The Seventh ACM Conference on Hypertext, N.Y.: ACM, 1996, 87-88.] | ||
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| + | Certainly the traditional boundaries between humans and machines have undergone a near-dissolution in recent years. Most of us already know people with pacemakers, reconstructed joints, or artificial or transplanted organs. By means of their bodily incorporation of machine (and especially computer) technology, these people dissolve the distinction between organisms and machines. Their status as " cyborgs" -- part human, part machine -- exposes the leakiness of the distinction between technology and nature. By questioning the traditional method of defining what is human (which usually entails comparisons with creature that fall into an equally badly-defined category of what is not), they question our received notions of what it means to be human. Through them, we begin to recognize the limited utility of the distinction between nature and culture. As Donna Haraway puts it, " Our machines are disturbingly lively, and we ourselves frighteningly inert" [152]. | ||
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| + | Thinking about cyborgs provides a way to talk about bodies without losing sight of the material (or technological) conditions that ground their lived experience. As we learn that bodies are susceptible to technological augmentation and enhancement, we find that the so-called natural body isn't quite so natural, unconstructed, or innocent after all. But talking about cyborgs means talking as much about technology as about bodies, and talking even more about how received conceptions of both bodies and technology uphold the very structures and processes that gave rise to such distinctions in the first place. As technological reconstructions of the body become commonplace, it is necessary to confront technology's political dimension, as a power to shape individuals -- to shape the body politic. Just as cyborgs integrate a variety of technological prostheses in order to constitute their own subjectivities, hypertext writing allows both reader and writer to weave their own meanings from a set of disparate textual elements. Hypertext, as a literal embodiment not only of postmodern fragmentation but also its possible resolution, repeats the cyborg paradigm on a textual, narrative level. Of course, a hypertext resists closure; as others have argued, a hypertexts resists endings, final validations or refutations of the reader's point of view. [See Harpold and Joyce] But perhaps we should not take our satisfactions for granted: perhaps the need for, and satisfaction of, closure is merely a special case of the desire to objectify and classify in the first place, a denial of subjectivity to others with equal, if occluded, claims to it. In that case, hypertext shares not only the cyborg insistence on patchwork subjectivity, a narrative " art of making do," but also the cyborg resistance to final determination or characterization, a resistance with consequences that are not only intellectual and theoretical, but also political -- as a technology with consequences for material bodies as they ground actual lives. | ||
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| + | Hypertext thus exemplifies the permeability of the boundary between organisms and machines, as it is embodied in the cyborg paradigm. But without an exploration of its implications, this observation of the uncanny resemblances between hypertext and cyborgs is merely academic; that is, in order for a hypertextually-motivated collapse of categories such as nature and culture to have real consequences, a politics of hypertext must be articulated. Early hypertext pioneers had some inkling of the political ramifications of such a close coupling of bodies and machines. Yet, despite hypertext theory's embrace of avant garde literary productions and its sympathies with postmodern literary criticism, it has yet to come to grips with the political questions hypertext poses for the relation of people to machines. | ||
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| + | http://www.cyberartsweb.org/cpace/ht/greco4.html | ||
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Revision as of 18:43, 13 May 2010
anything that is an external prosthetic device creates one into a cyborg. The idea of a cell phone being a technosocial object that enables an actor (user) to communicate with other actors (users) on a network (information exchange and connectivity) makes one into what David Hess calls low-tech cyborgs:
"I think about how almost everyone in urban societies could be seen as a low-tech cyborg, because they spend large parts of the day connected to machines such as cars, telephones, computers, and, of course, televisions. I ask the cyborg anthropologist if a system of a person watching a TV might constitute a cyborg. (When I watch TV, I feel like a homeostatic system functioning unconsciously.) I also think sometimes there is a fusion of identities between myself and the black box" (Gray, 373).
Contents
Four Kinds of Cyborg
"According to the editors of The Cyborg Handbook, cyborg technologies take four different forms: restorative, normalizing, reconfiguring, and enhancing (Gray, 3). Cyborg translators are currently thought of almost exclusively as enhancing: improving existing translation processes by speeding them up, making them more reliable and cost-effective. And there is no reason why cyborg translation should be anything more than enhancing". Source: Cyborg Translation
Consumptive vs. Necessitative Prosthetics
I'd additionally define two additional types of cyborgs based on consumptive practices: those who attach prosthetics as a necessity, and those who attach them as an external representation of status and tribal affiliation. In the latter case, one's external prosthesis is chosen carefully and updated frequently. This is most often seen in middle classes, especially in the young offspring of these classes.
Other specialized cyborg types:
1. Cyborgs actually do exist; about 10% of the current U.S. population are estimated to be cyborgs in the technical sense, including people with electronic pacemakers, artificial joints, drug implant systems, implanted corneal lenses, and artificial skin. A much higher percentage participates in occupations that make them into metaphoric cyborgs, including the computer keyboarder joined in a cybernetic circuit with the screen, the neurosurgeon guided by fiber optic microscopy during an operation, and the teen gameplayer in the local videogame arcarde. "Terminal identity" Scott Bukatman has named this condition, calling it an "unmistakably doubled articulation" that signals the end of traditional concepts of identity even as it points toward the cybernetic loop that generates a new kind of subjectivity (Gray, 322).
2. This merging of the evolved and the developed, this integration of the constructor and the constructed, these systems of dying flesh and undead circuits, and of living and artificial cells. have been called many things: bionic systems, vital machines, cyborgs. They are a central figure of the late Twentieth Century. . . . But the story of cyborgs is not just a tale told around the glow of the televised fire. There are many actual cyborgs among us in society. 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. The range of these intimate human-machine relationships is mind-boggling. It's not just Robocop, it is our grandmother with a pacemaker (Gray, 322). - George P. Landow, Professor of English and Art History, Brown University.
In "Cyborgology: Constructing the Knowledge of Cybernetic Organisms" -- the introduction to the (Gray, Introduction), four classes of cyborg are described:
- Cyborg technologies can be restorative, in that they restore lost functions and replace lost organs and limbs;
- They can be normalizlng, in that thev restore some creature to indistinguishable normality;
- They can be ambiguously reconfiguring, creating posthuman creatures equal to but different from humans, like what one is now when interacting with other creatures in cyberspace or, in the future, the type of modifications proto-humans will undergo to live in space or under the sea having given up the comforts of terrestrial existence;
- They can be enhancing, the aim of most military and industrial research, and what those with cyborg envy or even cyborgphilia fantasize.
The latter category seeks to construct everything from factories controlled by a handful of "worker-pilots" and infantrymen in mind-controlled exoskeletons to the dream many computer scientists have-downloading their consciousness into immortal computers (Gray, 3).
