The Chronicle: 1/31/2003: The Soul of a New Machine

Once a speculative idea, the cyborg is now a familiar subject in the humanities

By SCOTT McLEMEE

Cyborgs are hacking into the intellectual mainframe. They have taken over

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cultural studies, established a colony in the English department, and -- wet circuits glistening -- started to invade anthropology. (The media-studies people never had a chance.) Intimate couplings of flesh and technology, cyborgs dismantle old ideas about "nature" and "culture," "man" and "machine," scrambling them together in encrypted patterns that can scarcely be imagined by "humans" -- to use another terribly old-fashioned word ...

Not so fast! After all, there are at least a few meat-based hominids left in academe. But outsiders curious about recent developments in the humanities may be excused for thinking they have wandered onto the set of a science-fiction movie. A scan of recent titles reveals an abundance of books drawing on what might be called "the cyborg concept" -- the idea that people and technology are converging and merging, perhaps even already inextricably fused. What was once a speculative notion about the shape of things to come has become a normal part of the conversation, at least in some quadrants of scholarly life.

The term (itself a hybrid of "cybernetics" and "organism") was coined more than 40 years ago by scientists working in the space program. "A cyborg is essentially a man-machine system in which the control mechanisms of the human portion are modified externally by drugs or regulatory devices so that the being can live in an environment different from the normal one," explained The New York Times in 1960. By a neat coincidence of intellectual history, that was shortly after C.P. Snow's famous University of Cambridge lecture on "The Two Cultures," which inspired an outpouring of worry over the gap between the sciences and the humanities.

That gap is wider than ever. Experts rarely talk outside their specialties, much less across the cognitive divide. Yet musings about "the post-human future" among humanists are now as commonplace as e-mail. Interest isn't limited to scholars studying cyberpunk fiction, either.

During the early 1990s, the cyborg emerged as a trendy theoretical notion within cultural studies -- the conceptual equivalent of a tattoo and a pierced lip ("transgressive," perhaps, but mostly just baffling to the uninitiated). But today, references to the cyborg concept are far too routine to be cool. Literary historians interested in 19th-century authors are as likely to explore the notion of human-machine fusions as film scholars analyzing the oeuvre of Arnold Schwarzenegger. Cultural critics find in the cyborg a perfect metaphor for how we live now, a world in which information technology is everywhere, the human genome has been digitally mapped, and many people feel anxious if they can't spend a little time online every few hours.

Indeed, the strangest thing about interest in cyborgs in the humanities may be that scarcely anyone now finds it strange.

Manifest Destiny

Explorations at the frontier between the human and the technological span at least three centuries. In Man a Machine (1748), the French physician and amateur philosopher Julien Offray de La Mettrie proposed that the human soul was a byproduct of physical processes: "Everything depends on the way our machine is running," he wrote. The theory infuriated theologians and won the author exile. In 1818, a novel by Mary Shelley introduced the world to its first bioengineer, Victor Frankenstein. And in 1909, F.T. Marinetti published "The Futurist Manifesto," which called for artists and writers to forget the past and draw inspiration from the speed and violence of modern technology.

More-recent speculation within academe also has a manifesto: "A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century," by Donna J. Haraway, a professor of the history of consciousness at the University of California at Santa Cruz. In 1982, as Ms. Haraway recalls, the editors of Socialist Review asked her for a brief article on the issues facing feminist thinkers in the Reagan era.

Her landmark essay, first published in 1985, ended up setting the theoretical agenda long after the Gipper withdrew from public life, and it has been reprinted more than a dozen times. In The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism, the "Manifesto" runs some 30 closely printed pages, including annotations to guide students through Ms. Haraway's dense network of allusions to poststructuralist thinkers and contemporary science.

Calling the cyborg "a fiction mapping our social and bodily reality" and "an imaginative resource suggesting some very fruitful couplings," Ms. Haraway saw the mixture of organic and mechanical elements in the science-fiction image as a way to challenge conservative attitudes about gender, while also unsettling leftist attitudes toward science and nature. "Cyborg replication is uncoupled from organic replication," she wrote.

She also pointed out that a creature whose womb, so to speak, was a laboratory would cast into doubt traditional ideas about the roles of "father" and "mother." At the same time, she argued, the cyborg would make an unlikely hero for radicals, for high-tech research is typically financed by corporate interests, often with grants from the Defense Department. Cyborgs may be "the illegitimate offspring of militarism and patriarchal capitalism," wrote Ms. Haraway. "But illegitimate offspring are often exceedingly unfaithful to their origins. Their fathers, after all, are inessential."

The suggestion that feminists and leftists might have a stake in what Ms. Haraway called "technoscience" strongly influenced scholars in cultural studies -- and irritated their opponents. In Higher Superstition: The Academic Left and Its Quarrels With Science (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994), Paul R. Gross, a professor emeritus of life sciences at the University of Virginia, and Norman Levitt, a professor of mathematics at Rutgers University at New Brunswick, quoted passages from Ms. Haraway's work and declared themselves simply baffled. The provocative quality of her work (stimulating to some, annoying to others) comes through most clearly in a single line from the "Manifesto": "The boundary between science fiction and social reality," Ms. Haraway declares, "is an optical illusion."

Generation Cyborg

"Part of the impact of that essay was the timing," says Rob Latham, an associate professor of English and American studies at the University of Iowa. "The cyborg idea was in the air. People were entering more-intimate relationships with technology. Intellectuals started having big computers on their desktops, for one. And the cyborg was becoming a major element of popular culture. Haraway gave you a grip on why it was so fascinating. A lot was happening in the image of a metallic body beneath the flesh and muscle of The Terminator."

Mr. Schwarzenegger's film opened in 1984, not long before Ms. Haraway's "Manifesto" reached the rather smaller audience of Socialist Review. And readers of William Gibson's Neuromancer (1984), the first of the cyberpunk novels, were discovering a future in which information wars were fought on computer networks that plugged directly into the nervous system.

Countless variations on such themes have emerged over the past two decades. In Consuming Youth: Vampires, Cyborgs, and the Culture of Consumption, Mr. Latham interprets the social reality within those powerful science-fiction images.

For Mr. Latham, the contemporary fascination with human-machine synthesis reflects deep changes in the economy: the shift from the primacy of the factory (in which the routines of mass production and consumption shaped much of ordinary life) to a postindustrial system emphasizing innovation, flexibility, and speed. Those are values all associated with young people, whose knack for adapting to technological change is matched only by their insatiable desire to consume. Which, in turn, helps keep the wheels of postindustrial commerce turning.

Immersion in technology and the mass media provides youth with access to power while also threatening to subject them to domination, whether through electronic surveillance or plain old credit-card debt. In Mr. Latham's reading, the cyborgs in popular fiction and film offer an imaginative reconfiguration of the experience of being plugged into the postindustrial system. Another such image, he says, is that of the unquenchable consumer par excellence: the vampire.

Brave (and Kinky) New World

Mr. Latham's work draws on Karl Marx, who called normal life under capitalism a matter of "commodity fetishism." For Amanda Fernbach, an independent scholar, the cyborg embodies a different sort of fetishism, the kind that Freud discussed. Blurring the lines between the natural and the artificial, the cyborg transforms the limits of what people can imagine, and desire.

In Fantasies of Fetishism: From Decadence to the Post-Human, Ms. Fernbach, who works for an Internet company in New York, uses psychoanalytic theory to discuss the often strangely eroticized quality of cyborgs -- the imagery, for example, of "jacking into a system" by plugging wires into electronic sockets in the body.

For Freud, a fetish was a way of dealing with the uneasiness aroused in the fetishist by sexual difference. A man might become obsessed with a woman's high heels, say, to avoid Oedipal anxieties about castration. Whatever else might be said about that theory, it is ultimately rather conservative in its notions of gender and desire. The power and "otherness" implied by cyborg imagery go well beyond anything a Eurocentric patriarch of Freud's generation could imagine.

"Cloning is part of cyborg imagery, a means of creating our future selves without a heterosexual origin," says Ms. Fernbach. "What happens to differences of gender when they become fluid thanks to technology? If people can't deal with differences in skin color, what happens when we can proliferate bodily differences even more -- when you can have a third ear constructed, perhaps?"

Old-Time Cyborgs

Not all of the scholarly writing inspired by the cyborg concept tries to peer into the not-too-distant future. In Romantic Cyborgs: Authorship and Technology in the American Renaissance, Klaus Benesch, a professor of English at Germany's University of Bayreuth, examines traces of the cyborg in authors of the antebellum United States.

"As a scholar of American literature, you can't avoid the question of technology," says Mr. Benesch. "But traditionally, you would talk about these authors as being obsessed with it because they hate it and want to fend it off." Mr. Benesch finds a rather more ambivalent relationship with technology, and a surprising number of images merging human and machine.

In Edgar Allan Poe's story "The Man That Was Used Up" (1839), a garrulous war hero turns out to be constructed entirely of artificial parts; even his voice emanates from a "somewhat singular looking machine." (Three years earlier, Poe had used his considerable analytic skills to prove that a much-discussed mechanical chess player was actually operated by a midget hidden inside it.) Works by Nathaniel Hawthorne and Herman Melville also contain images of automatons, prostheses, and human beings with machine-like qualities.

"This recurring theme of biomechanical hybridity," as Mr. Benesch calls it, reveals an effort by early American writers to work out the terms of the relationship between the fine arts (including literature) and the useful arts (a term subsuming the products of craftwork and manufacture). "In the early American Republic," says Mr. Benesch, "when authors were trying to establish themselves as a full-fledged profession, they had to compete for respect with others like engineers and scientists." Their complex feelings about the undeniable impact of machinery on society appeared in their work in the form of cyborgs.

In short, they were a little like scholars in the humanities today, anxiously trying to figure out their place in a world shaped by strange new forces of technology. As a reminder of just how new, Mr. Benesch points out that the very word "technology" seems to have been introduced to America by Jacob Bigelow, a Harvard professor whose Elements of Technology appeared in 1829.

Cyborgs 'R' Us

One effect of reading a lot of scholarly work on cyborgs is that you begin seeing them everywhere. And rightly so, according to The Cyborg Handbook, a collection of essays and documents by scientists and people in the humanities. In their introduction, the editors write: "The range of these intimate human-machine relationships is mind-boggling. It's not just RoboCop, it's our grandmother with a pacemaker ... Not just the cyberwarriors of a hundred militaristic science-fiction stories, but arguably anyone whose immune system has been programmed through vaccination to recognize and kill the polio virus."

For David Hakken, an anthropologist at the State University of New York Institute of Technology at Utica, interest in the cyborg concept seems like a very roundabout way of coming to terms with the nature of humanity itself. In Cyborgs@Cyberspace? An Ethnographer Looks to the Future, he calls for "an anthropology of cyborgs." That turns out to be less futuristic than it sounds, for he also writes that "humans have been quite 'cyborgic' from early in the history of the species."

"There is this peculiar attitude that anthropology has toward technology," he continues. "On the one hand, defining man as 'the tool maker' is a classic kind of statement in our discipline. But there is also a tradition that locates tools outside of culture -- a sense that whatever is properly human is not technological. Once you say that the unit of study is the human and the technological as a unified whole, then anthropology has to be rethought -- which is what I'm trying to do by repositioning the human as a cyborg."

His peers' response, he says, has been underwhelming. "The people I thought would really want to take me on were the physical anthropologists, who tend to want a purely biological definition of what constitutes the human." But the bursting of the dot-com bubble, he says, left many of his colleagues feeling that the whole topic may be one of those cutting edges now permanently blunted.

The steady expansion of "cyborg discourse" -- so that it now covers human history from Australopithecus to the latest Star Trek spinoff -- could certainly render it a concept that, applying to everything, defines nothing. But scholars might yet want to ponder another matter: Even if we are all cyborgs now, and have been since the dawn of time, might there not be some deep need within us to see "the human" as essentially distinct from technology?

"Probably," says Mr. Hakken. "We can feel helpless in relation to these monoliths that we've created. It's as if the balance between the biological and the technological elements might tip so overwhelmingly toward the machine side. But that's a nightmare, not a prediction."

A READING LIST FOR POSTHUMANISTS

Neil Badmington, ed., Posthumanism (Palgrave, 2000)

Anne Balsamo, Technologies of the Gendered Body: Reading Cyborg Women (Duke University Press, 1996)

David Bell and Barbara M. Kennedy, The Cybercultures Reader (Routledge, 2000)

Klaus Benesch, Romantic Cyborgs: Authorship and Technology in the American Renaissance (University of Massachusetts Press, 2002)

Rodney A. Brooks, Flesh and Machines: How Robots Will Change Us (Pantheon Books, 2002)

Christopher Dewdney, Last Flesh: Life in the Transhuman Era (HarperCollins, 1998)

Gary Lee Downey and Joseph Dumit, Cyborgs and Citadels: Anthropological Interventions in Emerging Sciences and Technologies (School of American Research Press, 1997)

Amanda Fernbach, Fantasies of Fetishism: From Decadence to the Post-Human (Rutgers University Press, 2002)

Robbie Davis-Floyd and Joseph Dumit, eds., Cyborg Babies: From Techno-Sex to Techno-Tots (Routledge, 1998)

Elaine L. Graham, Representations of the Post/Human: Monsters, Aliens, and Others in Popular Culture (Rutgers, 2002)

Chris Hables Gray, Cyborg Citizen: Politics in the Posthuman Age (Routledge, 2002)

Chris Hables Gray et al., The Cyborg Handbook (Routledge, 1995)

Bruce Grenville, ed., The Uncanny: Experiments in Cyborg Culture (Vancouver Art Gallery, 2002)

David Hakken, Cyborgs@Cyberspace? An Ethnographer Looks to the Future (Routledge, 1999)

Donna J. Haraway, Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (Routledge, 1991)

Donna J. Haraway, Modest_Witness@Second_Millennium.FemaleMan©_Meets_OncoMouse™: Feminism and Technoscience (Routledge, 1997)

N. Katherine Hayles, How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics (University of Chicago Press, 1999)

Gill Kirkup et al., eds., The Gendered Cyborg: A Reader (Routledge, 2000)

Rob Latham, Consuming Youth: Vampires, Cyborgs, and the Culture of Consumption (Chicago, 2002)

Steve Mann and Hal Niedzviecki, Cyborg: Digital Destiny and Human Possibility in the Age of the Wearable Computer (Doubleday Canada, 2001)

Peter Menzel and Faith D'Aluisio, Robo Sapiens: Evolution of a New Species (MIT Press, 2000)

Philip Mirowski, Machine Dreams: Economics Becomes a Cyborg Science (Cambridge University Press, 2001)

Marie O'Mahony, Cyborg: The Man-Machine (Thames & Hudson, 2002)

Laura Otis, Networking: Communicating With Bodies and Machines in the Nineteenth Century (University of Michigan Press, 2002)

Janice Hocker Rushing and Thomas S. Frentz, Projecting the Shadow: The Cyborg Hero in American Film (Chicago, 1995)

Claudia Springer, Electronic Eros: Bodies and Desire in the Postindustrial Age (University of Texas Press, 1996)

Joanna Zylinska, On Spiders, Cyborgs and Being Scared: The Feminine and the Sublime (Manchester University Press, 2001)

Joanna Zylinska, ed., The Cyborg Experiments: The Extensions of the Body in the Media Age (Continuum, 2002)

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Volume 49, Issue 21, Page A14

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