The coming of the Mundane Cyborg

The emerging technological developments across various scientific fields have brought about radical changes in the ways we perceive and define what it means to be human in today"s highly technologically oriented society. Advancements in robotics, AI research, molecular biology, genetic engineering, nanotechnology, medicine, etc., are mostly still in an experimental phase but it is likely that they will become a part of our daily experience. However, human enhancement and emergence of autonomous artificial beings have long been a part of futures imagined in SF and cyberpunk. While focusing on the phenomenon of cyborg as a product of both social reality and fiction, this paper will attempt to offer a new perspective on selected SF and cyberpunk narratives by treating them not only as fictions but as theories of the future as well.

The Scientific Imaginary in Visual Culture, 2010

Cyborgs-cybernetic organisms, hybrids of humans and machines, have pervaded everyday life, the military, popular culture, and the academic world since the arrival of cyborg studies in the mid-1980s. There has been a recurrent theme in STS in recent decades, but there are surprisingly few cyborgs referred to in the early history of cybernetics in the USA and Britain. In this paper, I analyse the work of the early cyberneticists who researched and built cyborgs. We then use that history of cyborgs as a basis for reinterpreting the history of cybernetics by critiquing cyborg studies that give a teleological account of cybernetics, and histories of cybernetics that view it as a unitary discipline. We argue that cyborgs were a minor research area in cybernetics, usually classified under the heading of `medical cybernetics', in the USA and Britain from the publication of Wiener's Cybernetics in 1948 to the decline of cybernetics among mainstream scientists in the 1960s. During that period, cyberneticists held multiple interpretations of their field. Most of the research on cybernetics focused on the analogy between humans and machinesthe main research method of cyberneticsnot the fusion of humans and machines, the domain of cyborgs. Although many cyberneticists in the USA and Britain viewed cybernetics as a `universal discipline', they created contested, area-specific interpretations of their field under the meta-discourse of cybernetics.

The emerging technological developments across various scientific fields have brought about radical changes in the ways we perceive and define what it means to be human in today’s highly technologically oriented society. Advancements in robotics, AI research, molecular biology, genetic engineering, nanotechnology, medicine, etc., are mostly still in an experimental phase, but it is likely that they will become a part of our daily experience. However, human enhancement and emergence of autonomous artificial beings have long been a part of futures imagined in SF and cyberpunk. While focusing on the phenomenon of cyborg as a product of both social reality and fiction, this chapter will attempt to offer a new perspective on selected SF and cyberpunk narratives by treating them not only as fictions but as theories of the future as well. Furthermore, selected examples of the existing real-life cyborgs will show that SF narratives are not merely limited to the scope of imagination but are a constituent part of lived experience, thus blurring the boundaries between reality and fiction.

2015

In science fiction one of the key concerns has always been the question, "What is Human?" The cyborg, an amalgamation of organic and machine, is a frequent figure in the exploration of this question. Science fiction has considered the cyborg concept as early as the 1920s and continues to investigate this figure into the new millennium. Running parallel with considerations in science fiction, military research and development into creating a cyborg soldier, a superhuman war machine, has been an integral part of military affairs since WWII. In the 1980s, Donna Haraway proposed the cyborg as key metaphor in investigating feminism in technology and science. The cyborg in SF narratives begins with a concentrated concern with sexuality as a key indicator of what makes a human and then, into the 1980s, with the onset of general computer use in general society, the cyborg becomes a figure most often employed in the subgenre of cyberpunk. After the turn of the millennium the cyborg...

in "The History of Illustration", 2019

“… I would rather be a cyborg than a goddess” (Haraway 1985: 101). This statement ends Donna Haraway’s famous and influential 1985 article, “A Manifesto for Cyborgs: Science, Technology, and Socialist Feminism in the 1980s,” in which Haraway reconceptualises what it means to be human in contemporary society. For her, technologies are a way to reimagine feminism and to challenge and break down binary thinking based on differentiation and othering (for instance, that male and female are clear categories and opposites, with the female considered deviant from and inferior to the male ‘norm’). This provides food-for-thought for contemporary illustration by questioning how the world is represented and explained, while also providing a way to engage with pressing social and technological changes that alter the definition and meaning of being human, animal, natural, artificial, self, and other.

Since the publication in 1985 of Donna Haraway’s influential Cyborg Manifesto the cyborg has been invoked as a key image with which to unlock contemporary Western culture. The cyborg is ‘part-human, part-machine cybernetic organism), hence it straddles both the territories of nature and of culture, the organic and the inorganic. In practical terms, the cyborg condition affects many contemporary individuals: the existence of cochlear implants and defibrillators, immunization and medications to alter psychological states, among other medical and technological innovations, ensure that many humans are no longer entirely ‘natural.’ However, what value is to be accorded to this transformation of humanity is the subject of fierce debate. Fascinatingly, it is not technological capacity that creates the image of the cyborg. Before the West could build complex machines, its mythology was distinguished by the inclusion of beings that were part human, part machine. These beings existed as acts of the creative imagination. This paper will consider: the bronze giant Talos, created by the mythological Greek inventor Daedalus; the Norse goddess Freyja; and the Celtic king god Nuada, all of whom are ‘cyborgs’ in the modern sense, whilst nonetheless being the imaginative products of more ‘primitive’ societies than that of the present.

Logos i Ethos, 2020

We have often heard this debated; but it appears to us that we are ourselves creating our own successors; we are daily adding to the beauty and delicacy of their physical organisation; we are daily giving them greater power and supplying by all sorts of ingenious contrivances that self-regulating, self-acting power which will be to them what intellect has been to the human race. In the course of ages we shall find ourselves the inferior race. Inferior in power, inferior in that moral quality of self-control, we shall look up to them as the acme of all that the best and wisest man can ever dare to aim at.1 1 S. Butler, Darwin among the Machines.

Identities, Journal for Politics, Gender and Culture, 2013

In this paper I will offer an analysis of cyber technology, cyberspace and cyborg from its appearance in fiction to its contemporary realizations, in order to show symbolic place of cyborg has changed, in the light of contemporary power relations. I will focus on the cyborg figure in literature and film, mainly the cyberpunk genre characteristic for fictionalization of the relations between individual, society and technology. e ords cyborg, technology, life, cyberpunk Numerous connections, relations and intersections between fiction, technology, art and life have been named through terms (such as robot, cyberspace, genetic engineering, computer virus etc.) that have been coined in various works of fiction, and are now used in science and technology. I find this important because the articulation of the term is equal with the articulation of the concept, which means that those specific concepts now operative in reality were first introduced in fiction. 2 Same can be applied to a number of technological as well as critical anticipations of social and political relations in cyberpunk dystopian societies. The anticipations at issue have obtained direct or transformed realizations in contemporary society. This is by no means reducible to the trivial claim that science fiction of the past is the reality of the future. Nevertheless, it emphasizes the political and activist potential of fiction.

The Cyborg: A Treatise on the Artificial Man

Between man and machine, science fiction and bio-politics, Antonio Caronia unfolds the cyborg as part of our popular imagination, and as a field of social conflict. Tatiana Bazzichelli wrote the preface of the English translation of Caronia's book, launched at the "Disruption Network Lab" Event: CYBORG: Hacktivists, Freaks and Hybrid Uprisings, Kunstquartier Bethanien, Studio 1, Mariannenplatz 2, Berlin, May 29-30, 2015. http://www.disruptionlab.org/cyborg/ The full version of the Cyborg book (English language) is available at: http://meson.press/books/the-cyborg/