"Cyborg Politics: Super Human or Super Slave?"

  Thanks to popular culture and entertainment media, if I were to say the word

"cyborg" the first thing that would come to your mind would probably be

Terminator or Robocop, each half machine, half human, and both fully laden

with weapons of destruction, either for the good or harm of human kind.

Cyborgs make Gods and superheroes (or supervillains) out of ordinary, fallible

men (eg, Six Million Dollar Man, Steve Austin).

The Origin of the cyborg (cybernetic organism) can be seen to have been

conceived in the minds of the great thinkers of the Enlightenment; Descartes,

Galileo, Newton, Kepler, Bacon etc (Kimbrell 236) who " focussed fully on

treating nature in strictly mathematical and mechanical terms (Kimbrell 236)".

The human body was compared to the motor and "the mechanistic view of

nature created by the enlightenment is still our governing metaphor (Kimbrell

237)". As D.S. Hallacy Jr. writes in his 1965 book Cyborg: Evolution of the

Superman:

    [The body] is a purposeful structure, made up of a power

    supply, control system, pumps and plumbing, mechanical

    devices, electrochemical circuits, and so on. (47)

And Andrew Kimbrell writes:

    As confirmed materialists and mechanists, many of the leading

    intellectuals of the scientific revolution stubbornly resisted any

    view of animals that would allow them emotions, intelligence, or

    soul. (238)

  Ever since it's comparison to the machine, the human body has been

naturally and unnaturally shaped and trained for better and better efficiency.

Then, with the industrial revolution, it became imperative that the human body

perform with machine-like speed, accuracy and efficiency. US mechanical

engineer, Fredrick Winslow Taylor introduced a "system for 'managing'

workers for maximum efficiency (Kimbrell 246)". "He and his colleagues

carefully  examined every motion that factory workers made as part of the

production process (Kimbrell 246)". Every movement was charted then

recommendations made as to how to increase the efficiency of each worker

(Kimbrell 246), with no thought to the limitations of the human body, of

course until these limitations began to affect production. And today:

    In response to economic pressure and the continued

    influx of work related diseases and injuries,...bio-

    engineers...have begun extending the drive for more

    efficient workers in ways unimaginable to Taylor

    and the early pioneers of efficiency. (Kimbrell 247)

  Eugenics, a practice used regularly in farming and agriculture to produce

"super" stocks, is already looking at ways to create super-humans. The

Human Genome Project, government supported and funded, is looking to

catalogue the whole of human DNA, with the hope of being able to detect and

eliminate "faulty" or "defective" genes from the gene pool. Allies in the quest

to create the "perfect" ( by whose standards?) human being is the

technology of the cyborg, because where eugenics may fail, cyborg

technologies can take over. If we fail to eliminate the person predisposed to

blindness ( or obesity, or left-handedness, or dark skin, or female anatomy...),

we'll just put prosthetic machine eyes in, which will far outperform the nature-

made ones anyways.  "Prosthetics have been defined broadly as devices by

which humans not only regain abilities they have lost, but also add new

'unnatural' abilities (Hallacy 63)".

  The sci-fi image of people opting to replace fallible biological parts with

infallible, super-sensing, super-efficient machine parts isn't as fictitious as we

may think either. One has only to look at the current trend towards Virtual

Reality. Our "meat" bodies are of little consequence so the more we can do to

mechanize them, the better. Some cyberpunk trends even go one step further in

a full rejection of the body to want to exist solely in the sphere of the mind,

aided by computer technologies, the ultimate cyborg. This total disregard for

physical, earthly experience can be traced back to antiquity and the philosophy

of Plato, in which he claims the body a " 'tomb' for the soul (Plumwood 90)".

Another driving force behind "cyborgization" is the military. As I believe, and

many theorists suggest, cyborg technologies will be used less for the

betterment of the human condition, and more for greater efficiency and

strength- especially in the military- which will lead to power and profit for the

ones who hold the knowledge for creating these technologies. We can see it

happening now with developments to have fighter pilots "plugged-in" to their

planes with sensors that read their eye movements in order to fly more

efficiently.

  Donna Haraway writes "A Cyborg Manifesto" in which the cyborg becomes

a neutral symbol with fluid boundaries, a subject from which feminist politics

can be realized without loaded cultural or natural signifiers or codes, " [p]eople

are nowhere near so fluid, being both material and opaque. Cyborgs are ether,

quintessence (Haraway 153)". She envisions true equality and unity in a

marriage of technology and nature in the form of the cyborg. She says: "Nature

and culture are reworked; the one can no longer be the resource for

appropriation or incorporation by the other (151)". "The cyborg is a kind of

dissassembled and reassembled, post-modern collective and personal self.

This is the self feminists must code (163)".

Haraway has created a list of naturalized or "coded" terms and then a list of

equivalent "uncoded" terms:

    Coded terms                                                  Uncoded terms

representation                                              simulation

organism                                                      biotic component

perfection                                                     optimization

eugenics                                                        population control

reproduction                                                 replication

sex                                                                 genetic engineering

labour                                                            robotics

mind                                                              Artificial Intelligence

We can already see the frightening possibilities...

  In the next paragraph she writes:

    In relation to objects like biotic components, one must

    think not in terms of essential properties, but in terms

    of design, boundary constraints, rates of flows, systems

    logics, costs of lowering constraints. (162)

The first evidence of a problematic within Haraway's cyborg politics is  that

the language she chooses to use is NOT that of neutrality or ambiguity, it is

quite obviously the language of science and patriarchal reason. Although the

terms she uses can't be coded in any essentialist way, it is obviously biased

and coded in a different way. Throughout this essay Haraway does an

excellent job of breaking down, describing and defining how dualistic,

mechanistic Cartesian ideologies are manifesting in western ideology today, but

is she critiquing or appropriating? Can she be successful using the master's

tools to deconstruct the master's house?

  The second problematic is the obvious Platonic devaluation and

commodification of the body and physical experience, and the valuation of

intellectual discourse. Thinking of  "biotic components...in terms of...boundary

constraints (162)" reeks of Plato's notion of body as " the source of endless

trouble by reason of it's requirements and liability to change and disease

(Plumwood 90)", as fallibly limited and as biologically determined. Haraway

doesn't break down the old dualisms with her cyborg semiotics, she re-enforces

them.

  In response to Haraway's coded and uncoded lists, I came up with one of

my own that shows possible outcomes of the union of some naturalized

dualisms:

Mother                                Child                          Father

Biology                             Cyborg                         Technology      

Left                                     Centre                         Right

Bad                                   Empathy                       Good

Black                                 Grey                            White

Nature                         Native Cultures                   Culture

Female                         Hermaphrodite                   Male

Intuition                     Innate Knowledge                 Reason

Body                               Experience                     Mind

Feminine                         Androgynous                    Masculine    

Oppression           Individual Empowerment           Domination       

Homosexual                     Bisexual                         Heterosexual

Immediately one can see the advantages of the fluidity of the boundaries of the

child and " an argument for pleasure in the confusion of boundaries and for

responsibility in their construction (Haraway 150)", but as I imagine, the child

is never as quintessential as Haraway would have us believe. As Scott

Bukatman says in his book, Terminal Identity: The Virtual Subject in Post-

Modern Science Fiction; " The malleability of identity is... a further sign of

oppression and not an ambivalent release from that status (318)".These

malleable identities, while being open grounds for positive exploration of an

ontology, are also open to the immense influences of power, domination and

colonization.

  Haraway's cyborg is the "illegitimate offspring (151)" of the unequal

partnership between biology and technology, and although she would have us

believe otherwise, at this point in western ontology, is conceived more by an

act of rape than a loving intercourse between the two. Haraway seems to

realize her cyborg's less than legitimate beginnings when she hopes that the

cyborg offspring will be "exceedingly unfaithful to [its] origins (151)", but the

child learns its behavioral patterns from the intercourse it witnesses between

the parents, and if the partnership between them is unequal and often violent,

based on oppression and domination, the offspring will, more often than not,

embody one of these behaviors. As things stand it makes much more sense

that the cyborg offspring of technology and biology will favour one of these

ontologies and not actually become a healthy alternative to either. It will

not stand for a breakdown of boundaries as Haraway suggests, but only as a

painful reminder of the bitter struggle that created it.

  Scientists, cultural critics and sci-fi writers all portray an image of the cyborg

as either master or slave, whether intentional or not, which suggests that unless

the dualistic discourse that conceives the cyborg changes, it is destined to

follow these less than utopic paths. As Plumwood describes,  "Platonic

[western] thought draws fully on the available range of social relations of

subjugation to model the relation of lower to higher ontological orders (87)".

Why does Haraway think that her cyborgs will be any different?

Perhaps it is I, myself, that is continuing dualistic thought by not being able

to concile the human and machine parts of the cyborg identity. This is where

Haraway finds the ultimate irony in her proposition of cyborg identity politics,

in the fact that she sees these dualisms coming together and by their coming

together they each negate the others' dualistic function. But in good

conscience I cannot swallow Haraways version of irony, especially when I

read:

    No objects, spaces, or bodies are sacred in themselves,

    any component can be interfaced with any other if the

    proper standard, the proper code, can be constructed

    for processing signals in a common language. (Haraway 163)

Her way of thinking of the world is so obviously that of Cartesian mechanistic

thought, but also paradoxically, that of  uncritical 'extreme holism' (Plumwood

1993) and "privileging wholes over parts and sameness over difference, relies

on telescoping atomism and dualism (Plumwood 125)". Not only are humans

mechanised, but machines are humanized, so within a cyborg identity " [t]he

erasure of difference carried out under the sign of the Same non-

coincidentally brings humans out on top (Plumwood 130)", "There is an

arrogance in failing to respect boundaries and to acknowledge difference which

can amount to an imposition of self (178)". Western 'man' is running out

of places and peoples to colonize so his own construction, the machine,

seems the obvious next victim. This is just another way to control the

ghost in the machine, we become the machine: "Pre-cybernetic machines

could be haunted; there was always the spectre of the ghost in the machine

(Haraway 152)". Plumwood says:

    The machine image confirms the new confidence in

    control as well as the narrow and instrumental view

    of nature associated with a technological outlook.

    ...A machine is made to be controlled, and knowledge

    of its operation is the means to power over it. (109)

  Of course, all of these analogies are strictly metaphorically speaking, for

Haraway isn't suggesting that we all become cyborgs, rather, she is suggesting

that a cyborg epistemology could be the telos of the breakdown of western

dualistic thinking. An interesting point that Haraway makes in favour of the

cyborg is its ability to subvert unrecognized, "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 (153)". Its illegitimacy is assigned

value as a political instrument, and as Plumwood would argue,

instrumentalization is only another from of subjugation. The cyborg seems like

an extreme example of what Plumwood terms the "denial of difference", and

absolute universalization. Haraway says: "Far from signaling a walling off of

people from other living beings, cyborgs signal disturbingly and pleasurably

tight coupling (152)", whereas Plumwood points out: 

    Acknowledging the other's boundary and opacity of being is

    part of respect for the other. It is the master consciousness

    which presumes to violate boundaries and claims to subsume,

    penetrate and exhaust the other, and such treatment is a standard

    part of subordination; for example, of women, servants, the

    colonized, animals. (178)

  The two most important things to keep in mind about the "Cyborg

Manifesto" are that, one, Haraway is coming from a strongly socialist-feminist

agenda, and two, the manifesto was written in the mid 1980's. For a miriad of

reasons (which I will not discuss here for lack of space and time) both of

these factors explain a lot about the place this manifesto comes from. The

cyborg as savior could only be conceived of in the mind of socialism, as

when Haraway says: "Cyborg feminists have to argue that 'we' do not want

any more natural matrix of unity and that no construction is whole (157)".

  Eco-feminism has had a long standing debate with Haraway's cyborg politics,

and Stacey Alaimo writes in response to Haraway's Manifesto in an essay

entitled, Cyborg and Eco-Feminist Interventions: Challenges for an

Environmental Feminism.:

    Feminism could benefit from an alliance with technology's

    cultural power, but could such a feminism be separated

    from phallotechnology in order to open up the possibility

    of a feminist cyborg? (148)

She also says Haraway's image of the cyborg offers a promise of an escape

from the pitfalls of the "Mother Earth image" which "feeds capitalist

consumerism by playing into the hands of a public/private division that

threatens to contain the political force of the environmental movement (149)".

Alaimo says that Haraway "envision[s] a socialist feminism that doesn't exploit

nature (145)", either by glorifying it or by exploiting it as a resource for human

ends. She supports Haraway's image of cyborg by saying "nature interacts

with human-beings through mutual ecological relations (145)". Of course the

problem with this is that in the hybrid image of Haraway's cyborg doesn't

suggest "mutual ecological relations" at all, as I see it, but a complete and

absolute colonization of nature and the other. On the other hand,a point in

favour of what Alaimo is saying about Haraway, the benefit of taking a non-

essentialist approach is that it breaks down the tools for the marginalization of

women, nature, other, which is what Haraway is championing.

  As we have seen, Haraway's cyborg project seems riddled with the same

problems as the master systems she hopes to subvert, from denial of

difference to a Cartesian mechanistic view of the body and nature. Perhaps she

sees the benefit of the cyborg's slippery identity outweighing the harm that

comes from an identity based in absolute incorporation. The cyborg identity

only seems like the flip side of what Plumwood terms "radical exclusion",

which denies the 'other' as an autonomous agent and considers it important

only in defining that which it is not, the subject. So then on the other side of

the coin is the cyborg whose "incorporation corresponds to the totalizing

denial which denies the other by denying difference, treating the other as a

form of the same or self (Plumwood 155)."  We read about disassembly,

reassembly, biotic components, communications and confused boundaries in

Haraway's "Cyborg Manifesto", but I can't help but feel that what is missing in

her arguments is the notions of respect and care for the other , as nature and

non-human, especially. If we can come to a place of acceptance and

celebration of the differences between all forms of animate and inanimate

beings, then we've come a long way in truly breaking down the current

dualisms that enforce the continuation of forms of domination. Haraway would

do well to keep this in mind in future considerations of cyborg identities and

politics. Or maybe she should go hug a tree and call herself a cyborg.