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You Are Cyborg By Hari Kunzru (from
Wired Issue 5.02 February 1997) For Donna Haraway, we are already assimilated.
The
monster opens the curtains of Victor Frankenstein's bed. Schwarzenegger tears
back the skin of his forearm to display a gleaming skeleton of chrome and
steel. Tetsuo's skin bubbles as wire and cable burst to the surface. These
science fiction fevered dreams stem from our deepest concerns about science,
technology, and society. With advances in medicine, robotics, and AI, they're
moving inexorably closer to reality. When technology works on the body, our
horror always mingles with intense fascination. But exactly how does
technology do this work? And how far has it penetrated the membrane of our
skin? The
answers may lie in Meet
Donna Haraway and you get a sense of disconnection. She certainly doesn't
look like a cyborg. Soft-spoken, fiftyish, with an infectious laugh and a
house full of cats and dogs, she's more like a favorite aunt than a
billion-dollar product of the Sociologists
and academics from around the world have taken her lead and come to the same
conclusion about themselves. In terms of the general shift from thinking of
individuals as isolated from the "world" to thinking of them as
nodes on networks, the 1990s may well be remembered as the beginning of the
cyborg era. As
professor of the history of consciousness at the Cyberfeminism,
says Sadie Plant, director of the Centre for Research into Cybernetic Culture
at The Haraway
herself is a veteran of '60s counterculture, not a scene known for its faith in
technological transformation. She has that aura of slightly cynical wisdom
you get if you spend long enough fighting for left-wing causes. So it's
startling how opposed her ideas are to the back-to-nature platitudes that
dominate the old West Coast stereotype. This is a woman who has no interest
in being an earth mother or harking back to some mythical pretechnological
past. She once famously declared, "I'd rather be a cyborg than a
goddess," flying in the face of received feminist wisdom that science and
technology are patriarchal blights on the face of nature. As a cyborg,
Haraway is a product of science and technology, and she doesn't see much
point in the so-called goddess feminism, which preaches that women can find
freedom by sloughing off the modern world and discovering their supposed
spiritual connection to Mother Earth. When Donna Haraway says she's a cyborg,
she's not claiming to be different or special. For Haraway, the realities of
modern life happen to include a relationship between people and technology so
intimate that it's no longer possible to tell where we end and machines
begin. In fact, she's not the only cyborg in Healdsburg. There are 9,978 of
them. Sitting
on the porch, listening to Haraway explain her ideas over a background of
singing birds and buzzing insects, it's hard not to feel she's talking about
some parallel world, some chrome-and-neon settlement in a cyberpunk novel.
"We're talking about whole new forms of subjectivity here. We're talking
seriously mutated worlds that never existed on this planet before. And it's
not just ideas. It's new flesh."
"Think
about the technology of sports footwear," she says. "Before the
Civil War, right and left feet weren't even differentiated in shoe
manufacture. Now we have a shoe for every activity." Winning the
Olympics in the cyborg era isn't just about running fast. It's about
"the interaction of medicine, diet, training practices, clothing and
equipment manufacture, visualization and timekeeping." When the furor
about the cyborgization of athletes through performance-enhancing drugs
reached fever pitch last summer, Haraway could hardly see what the fuss was
about. Drugs or no drugs, the training and technology make every Olympian a
node in an international technocultural network just as
"artificial" as sprinter Ben Johnson at his steroid peak.
Networks
are also inside us. Our bodies, fed on the products of agribusiness, kept
healthy - or damaged - by pharmaceuticals, and altered by medical procedures,
aren't as natural as The Body Shop would like us to believe. Truth is, we're
constructing ourselves, just like we construct chip sets or political systems
- and that brings with it a few responsibilities. Haraway has no doubt that
to survive we need to get up to speed on the complex realities of
technoculture. To any of the usual good/bad, nature/nurture, right/wrong,
biology/society arguments, she smiles, breaks into her infectious, ironic
laugh, and reminds us that the world is "messier than that." It
might well become the quintessential 21st-century catchphrase. The ironic political myth
"The
Cyborg Manifesto" is a strange document, a mixture of passionate
polemic, abstruse theory, and technological musing. Haraway calls it "an
ironic political myth." It pulls off the not inconsiderable trick of
turning the cyborg from an icon of Cold War power into a symbol of feminist
liberation - not bad for the first thing she wrote on her newly acquired
computer. In
the manifesto, Haraway argues that the cyborg - a fusion of animal and
machine - trashes the big oppositions between nature and culture, self and
world that run through so much of our thought. Why is this important? In
conversation, when people describe something as natural, they're saying that
it's just how the world is; we can't change it. Women
for generations were told that they were "naturally" weak,
submissive, overemotional, and incapable of abstract thought. That it was
"in their nature" to be mothers rather than corporate raiders, to
prefer parlor games to particle physics. If all these things are natural,
they're unchangeable. End of story. Return to the kitchen. Do not pass Go. On
the other hand, if women (and men) aren't natural but are constructed, like a
cyborg, then, given the right tools, we can all be reconstructed. Everything
is up for grabs, from who does the dishes to who frames the constitution.
Basic assumptions suddenly come into question, such as whether it's natural
to have a society based on violence and the domination of one group by
another. Maybe humans are biologically destined to fight wars and trash the
environment. Maybe we're not. Feminists
around the world have seized on this possibility. Cyberfeminism - not a term
Haraway uses - is based on the idea that, in conjunction with technology,
it's possible to construct your identity, your sexuality, even your gender,
just as you please. In contrast to the prohibition-based feminism of the
so-called political correctness movement, which concentrates
on trying to police sexuality and legislate against "inappropriate"
behavior, the cyberfeminists revel in polymorphous perversity. They form a
broad church (after all, everything is permitted), its
expressions ranging from sober historical analyses of women as technologists
to the assertions of Australian art group VNS Matrix that the clitoris is a
tool for jacking into a higher-order cyberspace. Haraway is no happy-clappy
technology groupie - she's harshly critical of techno-utopians, including
some of those found between the covers of this magazine. But she's also no
fan of what she calls the "knee-jerk technophobia" of most feminist
politics. As the cyberfeminists of the webzine geekgirl put it, girls
need modems. In
a way, modems are at the center of cyborg politics. Being a cyborg isn't just
about the freedom to construct yourself. It's about networks. Ever since
Descartes announced, "I think, therefore I am," the Western world has
had an unhealthy obsession with selfhood. From the individual consumer to the
misunderstood loner, modern citizens are taught to think of themselves as
beings who exist inside their heads and only secondarily come into contact
with everything else. Draw a circle. Inside: me. Outside: the world.
Philosophers agonize about whether the reality outside that circle even
exists. They have a technical term for their neuroses - skepticism -
and perform intellectual acrobatics to make it go away. In a world of doubt,
getting across that boundary, let alone to other people, becomes a real
problem. Unless,
that is, you're a collection of networks, constantly feeding information back
and forth across the line to the millions of networks that make up your
"world." A cyborg perspective seems rather sensible, compared with
the weirdness of the doubting Cartesian world. As Haraway puts it,
"Human beings are always already immersed in the world, in producing
what it means to be human in relationships with each other and with
objects." Human beings in the '90s show a surprising willingness to
understand themselves as creatures networked together. "If you start
talking to people about how they cook their dinner or what kind of language
they use to describe trouble in a marriage, you're very likely to get notions
of tape loops, communication breakdown, noise and signal - amazing
stuff." Even while we mistake ourselves for humans, the way we talk
shows that we know we're really cyborgs. But
isn't this just rhetoric? It's all very well talking about cyborgs, but is
there any need to seriously believe in the idea? Yes, says Haraway.
"Feminist concerns," she argues vehemently, "are inside of
technology, not a rhetorical overlay. We're talking about cohabitation:
between different sciences and forms of culture, between organisms and
machines. I think the issues that really matter - who lives, who dies, and at
what price - these political questions are embodied in technoculture. They
can't be got at in any other way." For Haraway and many others, there's
no longer any such thing as the abstract. To
illustrate the point, Haraway begins to talk about rice. "Imagine
you're a rice plant. What do you want? You want to grow up and make babies
before the insects who are your predators grow up and make babies to eat your
tender shoots. So you divide your energy between growing as quickly as you
can and producing toxins in your leaves to repel pests. Now let's say you're
a researcher trying to wean the Californian farmer off pesticides. You're
breeding rice plants that produce more alkaloid toxins in their leaves. If
the pesticides are applied externally, they count as chemicals - and large
amounts of them find their way into the bodies of illegal immigrants from International
border controls, the question of natural versus artificial, the ethics of agribusiness,
and even the politics of labor regulation are networked together with the
biology of rice plants and pests. Who lives? Who dies? That's what Haraway
means when she talks about politics being inside technoculture. We can't
escape it. It's just that sometimes it's hard to see. The religion of biology Maybe
it was inevitable that Haraway would wind up blending science and politics
and thus breaking one of the big taboos. While studying for a biology
doctorate at Yale in the late '60s, Haraway realized "what I was really
interested in was not so much biology as a research science, but the way it
was a part of politics, religion, and culture in general." Part of a
commune active in gay liberation, women's rights, and civil rights; part of a
graduate biology program "up to its ears in anti-Vietnam War work
centering around chemical herbicides"; and part of a university integral
to the military-industrial complex prosecuting the war, she could hardly help
being political. The
immune system has since figured frequently in Haraway's work - as an
information system; as something that wasn't even clearly understood as a single
entity until the 1960s; as she says in her book Simians, Cyborgs, and
Women, a "potent and polymorphous object of belief, knowledge, and
practice." The immune system is a perfect example of the networked
consciousness of the cyborg age. It's also a good example of what Haraway
means when she denies there's any such thing as the abstract. In the end, her
work and her life, her friend's death, and theoretical biology are all
tangled together: a messy web of personal pain, politics, and science. By
the late '70s, Haraway was at Johns Hopkins teaching the history of science
and thinking about apes and the people who study them. "At that
time," she remembers, "primate behavior was a matrix for all kinds
of debates about aggression, sexual violence, dominance, and hierarchy."
As she wrote in Primate Visions (1989, Routledge), the book that came
out of her academic work at the university, "The commercial and
scientific traffic in monkeys and apes is a traffic in meanings, as well as
animal lives." Primatologists,
she argues, are working in the "borderlands," where the differences
between animals and humans are defined - differences that are messier than
people think. If apes are not fundamentally different from people, then our
feeling of righteous superiority over animals may be based on thin air. And
since primates are our close evolutionary cousins, their behavior may contain
significant clues to the development of our own - or serve to mirror our view
of it. Often,
primatologists' pictures of ape society contain covert justifications of a
particular human, social, or political model. Male primatologists often
showed these societies run by powerful males with female harems; a later
generation of female primatologists found very different forces at work. As
always, politics is threaded through the most objective science.
"Primates," Haraway remarks, "are a way into thinking about
the world as a whole." The state of people Haraway
finally wound up teaching at UC Santa Cruz. After the conservatism of
Baltimore and Johns Hopkins, California came as a relief. "It was like
coming home," she laughs, recounting a bizarre story about a radical
birthing group and a placenta-eating ceremony. "I understood I was in my
community. These were folks who would understand the craziness of it
all." It's an oddly moving thing to say. Haraway is faced with a world
of warring factions, colliding ideologies, clashing oppositions: the state and
the people, gay and straight, capitalism and communism, human and animal,
people and machines. It is all, of course, completely crazy. She has a habit
of describing the unlikeliest people as "folks," so you get
"the folks at the Pentagon" and "the folks fighting the
Vietnam War." The cyborg idea may in the end be Donna Haraway's way of
showing us how to let folks be folks, rather than carving them up into cruel,
arbitrary divisions. And with that, Healdsburg suddenly seems the perfect
vantage point from which to observe the madness of So
Donna Haraway sits on the porch, sips a beer, and pets her elderly cat, which
recently had a run-in with a raccoon. She's as complicated, as messy in her
allegiances and interests as we could wish for in a witness to the cyborg
age. If we're going to build a humane technoculture, instead of a Kafkaesque
nightmare, we would do well to listen to what she has to say. "Technology
is not neutral. We're inside of what we make, and it's inside of us. We're
living in a world of connections - and it matters which ones get made and
unmade."
Cyborg.
The word has a whiff of the implausible about it that leads many people to discount
it as mere fantasy. Yet cyborgs, real ones, have been among us for almost 50
years. The world's first cyborg was a white lab rat, part of an experimental
program at The
From
the start, the cyborg was more than just another technical project; it was a
kind of scientific and military daydream. The possibility of escaping its
annoying bodily limitations led a generation that grew up on Superman and
Captain It
wasn't only the military that was captivated by the possibilities of the cyborg.
The dream of improving human capabilities through selective breeding had long
been a staple of the darker side of Western medical literature. Now there was
the possibility of making better humans by augmenting them with artificial
devices. Insulin drips had been used to regulate the metabolisms of diabetics
since the 1920s. A heart-lung machine was used to control the blood
circulation of an 18-year-old girl during an operation in 1953. A 43-year-old
man received the first heart pacemaker implant in 1958. By
the 1970s, the idea of an augmented human had entered the mainstream. Steve
Austin, The Six Million Dollar Man, and his cohort Jaime Sommers, The Bionic
Woman (with bionic limbs and a super-sensitive bionic ear), were popular
heroes, their custom superpowers bought off the shelf like a digital watch.
The cyborg had grown from a lecture-room fantasy into the stuff of prime-time
TV. Of
course robots, automata, and artificial people have been part of the Western
imagination since at least as far back as the Enlightenment. Legendary
automaton builder Wolfgang von Kempelen built a chess-playing tin Turk and
became the toast of Napoleonic Europe. Mary Shelley's Frankenstein built a
monster out of body parts and activated it with electricity. Even the Indian
national epic, the Mahabharata, composed about 300 BC, features a lion
automaton. One
thing makes today's cyborg fundamentally different from its mechanical
ancestors - information. Cyborgs, Haraway explains, "are information
machines. They're embedded with circular causal systems, autonomous control
mechanisms, information processing - automatons with built-in autonomy." All
of which winds the story back to one man's personal science and the
beginnings of the Cold War. Norbert
Wiener wrote Cybernetics, or Control and Communication in the Animal and
Machine in 1948. The book was nothing if not ambitious. Wiener, an MIT
mathematician, saw amazing similarities between a vast group of different
phenomena. Catching a ball, guiding a missile, running a company, pumping
blood around a body - all seemed to him to depend on the transmission of
"information," a concept floated by Bell Laboratories' Claude
Shannon in his founding work on information theory. More specifically, these
processes seemed to depend on what the engineers had begun to call
"feedback." Wiener
took the name cybernetics from the Greek kubernetes, meaning
"steersman," and the image of a classical helmsman, hand on the rudder
of a sailing ship, perfectly captures the essence of his idea. Palinurus,
approaching the rocks, gets visual information about the ship's position and
adjusts course accordingly. This isn't a single event but a constant flow of
information. Palinurus
is part of a feedback loop, his brain getting input from the environment
about wind speed, weather, and current, then sending signals to his arms to
nudge the ship out of danger. Wiener saw that the same model could be applied
to any problem that involved trying to manage a complex system and proposed
that scientists use the same framework for everything. Wiener's
followers saw cybernetics as a science that would explain the world as a set
of feedback systems, allowing rational control of bodies, machines,
factories, communities, and just about anything else. Cybernetics promised to
reduce "messy" problems such as economics, politics, and perhaps
even morality to the status of simple engineering tasks: stuff you could
solve with pencil and paper, or, at worst, one of MIT's supercomputers. The
cyborgmakers were in the business of making Wiener's ideas flesh. For them,
the body was just a meat computer running a collection of information systems
that adjusted themselves in response to each other and their environment. If
you wanted to make a better body, all you had to do was improve the feedback
mechanisms, or plug in another system - an artificial heart, an all-seeing
bionic eye. It's no accident that this strangely abstract picture of the body
as a collection of networks sounds rather like that other network of
networks, the Internet; both came out of the same hothouse of Cold War
military research. Wiener's
dream of a universal science of communication and control has faded with the
years. Cybernetics has given rise to new areas like cognitive science and
stimulated valuable research in numerous other fields. But almost no one
today calls themselves a cyberneticist. Some believe that Wiener's project
fell victim to scientific fashion, its funding sucked away by flashy but
ultimately pointless AI research. Others think cybernetics was killed by the
basic problem that the nuts-and-bolts mechanisms of control and communication
in machines are significantly different from those in animals, and neither
are very like control and communication in society. So cybernetics, which was
based on an inspired generalization, fell victim to its inability to deal
with details. Whichever perspective is true (and as with most such stories,
the truth is likely to be a mixture of both), cybernetics has left two
important cultural residues behind. The first is its picture of the world as
a collection of networks. The second is its intuition that there's not as
much clear blue water between people and machines as some would like to
believe. These still-controversial concepts are at the bionic heart of the
cyborg, which is alive and well, and constructing itself in a laboratory near
you.
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