Cyborg
Definition
A cyborg is a cybernetic organism: a being whose functioning depends on an integrated system of organic and technological components, where the technological part participates in the organism's self-regulation rather than merely serving it.
Origin
The word was coined by Manfred Clynes and Nathan Kline in "Cyborgs and Space," published in Astronautics in September 1960.[1] Their proposal was that adapting the human body for space would be more tractable than carrying an Earth-like environment along with it, and — crucially — that the adaptation should be automatic and unconscious. The point was not to give the astronaut new equipment to operate but to extend the body's own homeostatic regulation so that the astronaut would be "free to explore, to create, to think, and to feel."
In the original formulation a cyborg is defined by unconscious integration, not by visible hardware. By that standard a pacemaker recipient is more clearly a cyborg than someone wearing a headset.
The first thing ever called a cyborg was a laboratory rat with an implanted osmotic pump — see cyborg animals.
Haraway and the Political Cyborg
Donna Haraway's "A Manifesto for Cyborgs" (Socialist Review, 1985; revised as "A Cyborg Manifesto," 1991) took the term somewhere Clynes and Kline had not. For Haraway the cyborg is a figure for a subject that is constitutively hybrid and therefore cannot be sorted into the oppositions that organise Western thought: nature/culture, human/animal, organism/machine, physical/non-physical, male/female. Because the cyborg has no origin story — no Eden, no lost wholeness to be restored — it is unavailable to the politics of purity and return.
Her formulation "I would rather be a cyborg than a goddess" was directed at a strand of feminism that grounded itself in nature and the female body, and it is the reason the essay has been read far outside technology studies.
Degrees and Disputes
The term's usefulness is limited by its elasticity. Several positions are in circulation:
- Strict. Only integrated, typically implanted systems that participate in regulation count.
- Broad. Any human whose ordinary functioning depends on technology — which, following Andy Clark's Natural-Born Cyborgs, includes everyone with a notebook, a wristwatch or literacy.
- Figurative. Haraway's usage, where the cyborg is a political and epistemological figure rather than a description of anyone in particular.
Most useful work sits between, treating "cyborg" as naming a relation of dependency and integration that admits of degree, and asking in each case what is integrated, how tightly, and who controls it.
Relevance to Cyborg Anthropology
The term names this field's object. Its value is not that it settles what a person is but that it refuses the assumption that the boundary of the body is the boundary of the person — which is the assumption most law, ethics and design still run on.
Related Reading
- Manfred Clynes
- Donna Haraway
- A Cyborg Manifesto
- Cyborg Animals
- Natural-Born Cyborgs: Minds, Technologies, and the Future of Human Intelligence
- Extended Self
- Implant
