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November 9, 2006
One solution to Fredrick Jameson's lost (dissolved or fragmented subjectivity) liberal humanist subject in postmodernity is the cyborg --a synthetic figure of human and machine. It refers to the way that technology penetrates the membrane of our skin so as to produce the technological body. It offers an alternative to the back-to-nature ethos of those romantics harking back to some mythical pretechnological past.
Donna Harraway, who makes the case for the cyborg figure in her 'A Manifesto for Cyborgs: Science, Technology and Socialist Feminism in the 1980s', says that this figure is neither bounded nor autonomous as it is a function of multiple, intersecting communication networks. She says that a cyborg body is not innocent; it was not born in a garden; it does not seek unitary identity. With an intimate experience of boundaries, their construction and deconstruction and a penchant for fusing, coupling and (re)assembling parts, the cyborg is both a material being in constant flux, and a framework through which to imagine new collaborative and collective identities.
A function of multiple, intersecting communication networks? What does that mean? A hacker? It refers to the shift shift from thinking of individuals as isolated from the "world" to thinking of them as nodes on networks. So being a cyborg isn't about how many bits of silicon you have under your skin or how many prosthetics your body contains.
Harraway's argument is that our technological world:
is one of tangled networks - part human, part machine; complex hybrids of meat and metal that relegate old-fashioned concepts like natural and artificial to the archives. These hybrid networks are the cyborgs, and they don't just surround us - they incorporate us. An automated production line in a factory, an office computer network, a club's dancers, lights, and sound systems - all are cyborg constructions of people and machines.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
Being a cyborg is about networks.
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