Cyborgs are hybrid entities that are neither wholly technological nor completely organic, which means that the cyborg has the potential not only to disrupt persistent dualisms [in language and thought] … but also to refashion our thinking. (Balsamo). Drawing on current scholarly work, I will discuss is cyborg still a transgressive figure in the following.
Since technology develops rapidly day by day, it is predicted and can be sure that the cyborg will be more and more advance and intelligent than human. Soon they will exceed the expectation of human. As Donna Haraway mentioned, “The cyborg is a creature in a post-gender world; it has no truck with bisexuality, pre-oedipal symbiosis, unalienated labour, or other seductions to organic wholeness through a final appropriation of all the powers of the parts into a higher unity.”[1] Because of these, it is possible that human will be replaced by cyborgs in the future. Haraway had something similar since she said, “The cyborg is resolutely committed to partiality, irony, intimacy, and perversity. It is oppositional, utopian, and completely without innocence. No longer structured by the polarity of public and private, the cyborg defines a technological polls based partly on a revolution of social relations in the oikos, the household. Nature and culture are reworked; the one can no longer be the resource for appropriation or incorporation by the other. The rela-tionships for forming wholes from parts, including those of polarity and hierarchical domination, are at issue in the cyborg world.”[2] Moreover, the technology will blur the boundary between animal-human (organism) and machine. Haraway wrote that, “….. basically machines were not self-moving, self-designing, autonomous. They could not achieve man's dream, only mock it. They were not man, an author to himself, but only a caricature of that masculinist reproductive dream. To think they were otherwise was paranoid. Now we are not so sure. Late twentieth-century machines have made thoroughly ambiguous the difference between natural and artificial, mind and body, self-developing and externally designed, and many other distinctions that used to apply to organisms and machines. Our machines are disturbingly lively, and we ourselves frighteningly inert.”[3] And Haraway had a subset of this distinction, in which she noted that the boundary between physical and non-physical is very imprecise for us. “Our best machines are made of sunshine; they are all light and clean because they are nothing but signals, electromagnetic waves, a section of a spectrum, and these machines are eminently portable, mobile -- a matter of immense human pain in Detroit and Singapore. People are nowhere near so fluid, being both material and opaque. Cyborgs are ether, quintessence. The ubiquity and invisibility of cyborgs is precisely why these sunshine-belt machines are so deadly. They are as hard to see politically as materially. They are about consciousness - or its simulation.”[4]
In another source of Donna Haraway’s work, it talked about the view from Donna Haraway towards the political identity of cyborgs. Obviously, Haraway is very cleared about what the cyborgs are doing since the article stated “She is very clear that we must enter the cyborg politic with eyes wide open, and be aware of its agenda. By trying to construct and deconstruct the binaries between machine/human, man/woman, white/black and revolutionary/conservative, she is trying to give ways to think differently about the balance of power in human systems.”[5] In addition, Haraway pointed out three major boundaries break down in the formation of cyborgs, namely human and animal; animal-human and machine and physical and non-physical.
Another source that I had found is about Viagra Cyborgs. The writer Annie Potts showed some of her ideas towards cyborgs about the blurring boundaries between natural and artificial after men have intake the Viagra. She had written this, ‘As Meika Loe has argued, Viagra rhetoric consistently uses and produces metaphors of machinery: the penis is treated as part of the male machine; erections are seen to operate according to the principles of simple hydraulics, and as Barbara Marshall puts it, Viagra is constructed as “a mechanical solution to a mechanical problem”.’[6] She even had a new term Viagraborg to imply the men after taking Viagra. Furthermore, she listed out some of the key purposes of cyborgs that are supposed to provide, which “can be restorative (they return lost functions as in the case of prosthetic organs or limbs), normalizing (they re-establish some entity to a state indistinguishable from ‘normality’), and enhancing (they improve a current capacity or function).”[7]
As a matter of fact, technology has been a great help and aid to the development of cyborgs. In David Mertz’s work, he said that “Early examples of cyborgs generally centered around mechanical enhancements to motion; the growing prevalence of electronic sensors and computers led to discussion of cyborgs that improve human perception, cognition, and communications channels. With inventions in genomics and nanotechnology at the start of the 21st century, visions of cyborgs often discuss augmentation of human health and longevity.”[8] He also expressed the idea that humans in the last several thousand years are shaped by the utilization and presence of technologies around them or physically manipulated or attached to them. Thus for cyborgs, they must have “a meaningful feedback mechanism with its biological aspects.”[9] And there is an expression in which he quoted other scholar’s idea about representing human as cyborgs and have a comparison with Donna Haraway’s thinking, such as “For some, such as Haldane (1923) or Weiner (1965), cyborgs simply represent an extension of the positive capabilities of technologies; most practicing doctors and medical researchers probably share this attitude, albeit infrequently naming medically assisted humans as cyborgs. Another trend in social thought, however, puts a positive light on cyborgs because of their possibility of breaking down normative roles of gender, class, race, or other subaltern status (perhaps as much by compelling metaphor as by direct intervention). This tradition largely follows Michel Foucault’s conception of biopower; Haraway (1991) is a prominent thinker in this tradition.”[10]
For the final source that I have found, it is Cyborgs and moral identity by G Gillett. The superficial summary of this article is about the writer have some doubt about the blurred boundaries between integrated part human and part machine. He raised an argument that “If my brain functions in a way that is supported by and exploits intelligent technology both external and implantable, then how should I be treated and what is my moral status—am I a machine or am I a person?”[11] Since there is no absolute definition to indicate human and cyborgs, the answer remains undefined. Yet, he supported this with some of the medical cases to provide further comparison and reference.
Bibliography
1. Haraway, Donna. Simians, (1991) ‘Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature’, http://www.stanford.edu/dept/HPS/Haraway/CyborgManifesto.html (accessed 2 March 2009)
2. Haraway, Donna. (1991) ‘A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century’, http://www.hynam.org/HY/pap/cyborg.pdf (accessed 1 March 2009)
3. Potts, Annie. ‘Sex and the Body’. http://www.lse.ac.uk/collections/BIOS/pdf/AnniePotts.pdf (accessed 1 March 2009)
4. Mertz, David. ‘Cyborgs’. http://gnosis.cx/publish/mertz/Cyborgs.pdf (accessed 2 March 2009)
5. Gillett G.. (2005) ‘Cyborgs and moral identity’. Journal of Medical Ethics 32, http://jme.bmj.com/cgi/content/full/32/2/79 (accessed 1 March 2009)
Footnotes
[1] Donna Haraway. Simians. Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature. 1991. p.150. http://www.stanford.edu/dept/HPS/Haraway/CyborgManifesto.html
[2] Donna Haraway. Simians. Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature. 1991. p.151. http://www.stanford.edu/dept/HPS/Haraway/CyborgManifesto.html
[3] Donna Haraway. Simians. Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature. 1991. p.152. http://www.stanford.edu/dept/HPS/Haraway/CyborgManifesto.html
[4] Donna Haraway. Simians. Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature. 1991. p.153. http://www.stanford.edu/dept/HPS/Haraway/CyborgManifesto.html
[5] Donna Haraway. "A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century". 1991. p.2. http://www.hynam.org/HY/pap/cyborg.pdf
[6] Annie Potts. Viagra Cyborgs: Creating ‘Better Manhood Through Chemistry’?. p.1-2. http://www.lse.ac.uk/collections/BIOS/pdf/AnniePotts.pdf
[7] Annie Potts. Viagra Cyborgs: Creating ‘Better Manhood Through Chemistry’?. p.3. http://www.lse.ac.uk/collections/BIOS/pdf/AnniePotts.pdf
[8] David Mertz. Cyborgs. p.1. http://gnosis.cx/publish/mertz/Cyborgs.pdf
[9] David Mertz. Cyborgs. p.1. http://gnosis.cx/publish/mertz/Cyborgs.pdf
[10] David Mertz. Cyborgs. p.2. http://gnosis.cx/publish/mertz/Cyborgs.pdf
[11] G Gillett. Cyborgs and moral Identity. 2005. p.1. http://jme.bmj.com/cgi/content/full/32/2/79
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