Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature.

‘The cyborg is our ontology it gives us our politics’ (Haraway, D., 1991, p. 150)

In her Cyborg Manifesto, Donna Haraway defines the cyborg as ‘a hybrid of machine and organism’ (p. 149); it is at once organic and engineered, the cyborg of fiction inhabits a world that is also organic and engineered. Haraway clearly argues that humans too inhabit such a world and that humans are equally organic and engineered. Haraway draws examples from science and medicine to persuade that humans have become cyborgs (p. 150). These examples are drawn from the westernised human and not humanity as a whole; in light of this I believe that it cannot be said that all humans have become cyborgs. Nevertheless, the cyborg of fiction, for Haraway, has become a part of our reality; it influences our reality; we take inspiration for our reality from the cyborg. The Cyborg of fiction, she says, maps our reality. The concept of cyborg for Haraway is genderless; ‘the cyborg is a creature in a post-gender world’ (p. 150). The cyborg is non-historical; it does not have a history that is conducive to the western tradition of an ‘origin story’ (p. 151). If we have become cyborgs then the relationship between human and nature in western humanist ontology (the belief that we have ‘unique capabilities and abilities’ (Audi, 1999, cited in Bennett and Royal, 2009, p. 397) becomes problematic; the way that the foundations of this system of dualism can be analysed has evolved or to be more precise it has changed. The boundaries between human and animal and organic and machine have been undermined as has the patriarchy that is the western tradition, which is widely viewed as being responsible for the exploitation of nature and the ‘other’. Within this framework Haraway suggests that the cyborg has brought the human closer to a pre-existing monism or affinity with nature. In deconstructing the cyborg we have the tools to deconstruct our ontology.

Cover Artwork

Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? Book Review

Domen Lombergar, Posthuman (2007)

Available from : http://www.domenlo.com/gallery/cyberpunk/posthuman-decimus/

Introduction

I would like to begin this blog with a very short discussion of the nature of postmodern. For
Jameson (1991) the postmodern signals the end of the bourgeois ego; it brings with it the end of the ‘unique’ and ‘personal’. In this context liberation of the centred subject may mean liberation from anxiety as well as liberation from feelings of any sort, ‘since there is no longer a self present to do the feeling’ (p. 193). Here postmodern examines issues that are at the centre of the western philosophical tradition. This questioning of the western tradition of the self lends itself to the concept of the ‘cyborg’ and the ‘android’. The term ‘cyborg’ is a diminutive of cybernetic organism. It denotes the merging of machine with organism, this can be anything from a human having a prosthetic arm to a microchip inserted (Mann, 2001, p. 477). The term ‘android’ on the other hand is used to refer to a humanoid robot which is a ‘synthetically created human, usually of organic or biological origin’ (Mann, 2001, p. 465). Both concepts discussed here are popular manifestations in science fiction writing. They are both quite distinct from one another, however, they have a unifying characteristic that is they are not human in the traditional sense. Similarly the three
seminal pieces and the novel that this blog will discuss have a common thread. They, all four, discuss what it is to be post human and human and how the human can be distinguished from the post human. They supply the tools to deconstruct traditional ontological thought and they cross the boundaries of ‘fiction’ and ‘reality’.