The Cyborg

The cyborg functions as an intervention in the project of humanism, positing a convergence between the organic and the built, a harmonious dispersal of the body among technological devices that coalesce into one supplemented being. Body enables technology, technology enables body. The Proper Other gestures toward questions about the cyborg within a neo-liberal world-state: are the cyborg's technological appliances a technique of interpellation into a neo-liberal capitalist regime? Is the move toward a borderless organic-data body a final bio-political gambit? Is the ideology of hybridity a tool to marginalize further the already other as constituted by the ideology of ability? Isn't the cyborg a new bodily norm in a silicon wrapper?

Toward a Citational History

"Modern medicine is also full of cyborgs, of couplings between organism and machine, each conceived as coded devices....

"By the late twentieth century, our time, a mythic time, we are all chimeras, theorized and fabricated hybrids of machine and organism; in short, we are cyborgs. Ths cyborg is our ontology; it gives us our politics. The cyborg is a condensed image of both imagination and material reality, the two joined centres structuring any possibility of historical transformation. In the traditions of 'Western' science and politics--the tradition of racist, male-dominant capitalism; the tradition of progress; the tradition of the appropriation of nature as resource for the productions of culture; the tradition of reproduction of the self from the reflections of the other - the relation between organism and machine has been a border war.

"The cyborg does not dream of community on the model of the organic family, this time without the oedipal project. .... Cyborgs are not reverent; they do not re-member the cosmos. They are wary of holism, but needy for connection—they seem to have a natural feel for united front politics, but without the vanguard party.

"The main trouble with cyborgs, of course, is that they are the illegitimate offspring of militarism and patriarchal capitalism, not to mention state socialism. But illegitimate offspring are often exceedingly unfaithful to their origins. Their fathers, after all, are inessential."
                                          ~ Donna Haraway,The Cyborg Manifesto (1991) 150-1.

"Donna Haraway's popular notion of the cyborg might serve as a theoretical prototype for constructing a self that can negotiate the incompatiility between 'disabled' as physical fact and 'person' as member of the human community. [The cyborg is] Similar to the grotesque-as-liminal but freed from its negative connotations....

"The cyborg makes it possible to imagine a coherent entity characterized by 'permanent partiality,' shifting multiple identities....

"According to the principle of unity, the disabled person becomes grotesque either in the sense of a gargoyle, breaching boundaries, or in the sense of a eunuch, on who is incomplete, not whole. But if unity is no longer th organizing principle of the world and self—as the modernists lamented and the postmodernists celebrate—then the grotesque sheds its twisted, repugnant, and despair-laden implications and becomes a cyborg: the affirmed survivor of cultural otherness...."
                                         ~ Rosemarie Garland Thomson, Extraordnary Bodies (1996) 114-5.

"Haraway is so preoccupied with power and ability that she forgets what disability is. Prostheses always increase the cyborg's abilities; they are a source only of new powers, never of problems. The cyborg is always more human—and never risks to be seen as subhuman. To put it simply, the cyborg is not disabled."
                                           ~ Tobin Siebers, Disability Theory (2009) 63.