A cyborg is a cybernetic organism—a human-machine hybrid. Though the cyborg still seems to be mostly a creature of science fiction, Katherine Hayles points out that “about 10% of the current U.S. population are estimated to be cyborgs in the technical sense, including people with electronic pacemakers, artificial joints [and limbs], drug implant systems, implanted corneal lenses, and artificial skin” (qtd. in Landow “Cyborg”).
The cyborg, then, is a person with prosthetic extensions or enhancements, such as those listed above. But there are also what Katherine Hayles calls “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” (qtd. in Landow “Cyborg”). We might add to this list the theorists (such as Hayles and Donna Haraway) who use the idea of the cyborg to make their theoretical arguments. In our post-modern world, with just about everyone “plugged in” (especially college students), we are almost all of us “metaphoric cyborgs.”
Jay Clayton would say that our cyborg-nature is more than merely metaphoric. He writes: “Most people in the West today are cyborgs. They have internalized technology so completely that their identities have been transformed” because they have been “reshaped by the total integration of technology and the body.” And yet, becoming aware of this situation, most people resist being called cyborgs. This is not just a reaction against technology, but also against the “complicity it establishes between the individual, as a cybernetic system, and the commercial, bureaucratic, and military systems against which the modern liberal subject has often defined itself.”
I think many of us would accept that we are metaphoric cyborgs, but not actually cyborgs. The idea that we are part machine, part robot, is repulsive to many people who believe they are distinct and independent beings—independent of machines, and of “commercial, bureaucratic, and military systems.” But then there are studies that show that the common use of computer technology (and other digital devices) actually “re-hardwires” our brain, reconfiguring our thinking and even our sense of self, making our brain into software for the hardware of the computer. If this is true, it seems that we are more than “metaphoric” cyborgs, whether we like it or not (and many of us don’t).
The implications for the student of digital literature seem quite clear: if we use a machine to access, read, process, and store data in the form of digital literature, we are affecting our brain configuration, and becoming more like a literal cyborg. This is something that Katherine Hayles (once again) addresses in her article on Patchwork Girl and hypertext: “Because electronic hypertexts are written and read in distributed cognitive environments, the reader necessarily is constructed as a cyborg, spliced into an integrated circuit with one or more intelligent machines. To be positioned as a cyborg is inevitably in some sense to become a cyborg, so electronic hypertexts, regardless of their content, tend toward cyborg subjectivity.”
But again, many students, trained to view literature as something uplifting, as bearing time-honored cultural value, as affirming the best and most noble qualities of the human being, resist “cyborg subjectivity.” In fact, many would see literature (and by extension art) as the last bastion of human subjectivity in a increasingly mechanistic and machine-mad world. To say that this is basically a Romantic stance would mean little to most students today, but the relationship of literature to technology, and our relationship to technologized literature, is a vital question for our consideration in this class. I do not pretend to have the answer to that question here; it is beyond the scope of a blog entry—probably beyond the scope of a semester of digital literature.
Leaving aside the question of whether we are “metaphoric” or actual cyborgs, I would argue that our attitudes towards the cyborg have changed over the years, and will no doubt continue to change. In fact, I can imagine writing a paper on the topic, which would look like:
Title: “Canning the Uncanny: The Naturalization of the Cyborg in Ironman.”
Explanation of the title, in introductory paragraph: The uncanny is a psychological term that Ernst Jentsch used to explain the anxiety we feel caused by “doubts whether an apparently animate being is really alive; or conversely, whether a lifeless object might not be in fact animate,” and refers “to the impression made by waxwork figures, ingeniously constructed dolls and automata” (quoted in Freud). In the current context, this would include robots and especially cyborgs, which are part human and part machine. “Naturalization” refers to the opposite condition: we accept something as normal and, the anxiety gone, no longer even think about it. My thesis, then, is that after a period of anxious speculation we have by now mostly accepted the idea of the cyborg as a cultural symbol, and are well on the way to accepting that we ourselves are “metaphoric” cyborgs.
In the paper proper, I would consider three phases in the history of the cyborg.
I. Utopian Cyborg. Utopian means “no place”; it is a hypothetical, imaginative place of ultimate possibility. The utopian cyborg is a creature of this hopeful possibility, as imagined by cybernetic theorists like Norbert Weiner, the inventor of cybernetics. As Katherine Hayles makes clear in her book How We Became Posthuman, the early cybernetic thinkers considered mechanically-enhanced humans to be a good thing, a condition that did not threaten the liberal subject—the autonomous, rational self. At this early stage, before the advent of the personal computer, works in popular culture—particularly films, television programs, and science fiction novels—tended to celebrate the possibilities of cybernetic enhancement of the human. Here I would sample some of these works, such as television’s Six Million Dollar Man and Hans Moravec’s novel Mind Children.
II. Dystopian Cyborg. A dystopia is a utopia gone bad, a proposed paradise which has been marred by technology run amok, no longer under the control of humans. The dystopian cyborg, then, is an out-of-control monster, generally wreaking havoc and making human life miserable. This is the cyborg most of us are familiar with in the age of the personal computer and computer networks; popular culture is replete with these monstrous, uncanny cyborgs, such as the cyborgs in the Terminator films, the Matrix films, and Blade Runner; the Six Million Dollar Man and the Borg collective (Star Trek franchise) in television; and the rogue operators in cyberpunk fiction (particularly in the novels of William Gibson) in literature.
III. Ubiquitopian Cyborg. If utopian means “no place,” ubiquitopian means “every place.” Not only is the cyborg more accepted and common in a Web 2.0 environment (thus “everywhere”), but the distributed nature of the self over a network, with many machine-mediated versions planted throughout cyberspace, also speaks to the dispersed, everywhere-ness of the cyborg. My case in point would be the film Ironman, which features a man who is quite literally a cyborg, with a pace-maker in his chest, and when in his robot suit, a fully-integrated man-machine hybrid. He is also someone plugged into a network by which he can be monitored by others, and is thus “cognitively distributed” (I would also find some current literature that would provide some equivalent cases). The important point here is that by now, with the ubiquity of personal computing and social networking sites, we are becoming less bothered by the implications of the cyborg, and the idea that we are, at least in part, cyborgs ourselves. In this sense, the concept of the cyborg has become naturalized, safely canned for consumption.
The above “paper” might be a bunch of malarkey, and it might never be written, but I put it out there (in cyberspace, like a good cyborg should) to give an example of how one might think through the idea of the cyborg, in the context of popular art and literature. You might come up with a very different schema, which is fine, but the cyborg is not something we can now dismiss as a pipe-dream. If only as a concept reflected in imaginative works, the cyborg must be reckoned with. At the very least it will prepare you to think seriously before getting that wireless-access node implanted in your brain, something that might be a very real possibility within a decade.
Works Cited:
Clayton, Jay. “Frankenstein’s Monster, Replicants, and Cyborgs.” Charles Dickens in Cyberspace. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003.
Freud, Sigmund. “The Uncanny.” Laurel Amtower homepage.
<http://www-rohan.sdsu.edu/~amtower/uncanny.html>. 10 November 2008.
Hayles, N. Katherine. How We Became Posthuman. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1999.
Landow, George P. The Cyborg. Cyberart Database.
<http://www.cyberartsweb.org/cpace/cyborg/cyborgov.html>. 10 November 2008.
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