Cyborg
Most recent forays into technocultural studies have been inspired by Donna Haraway's influential essay, "Cyborg Manifesto," which originally appeared in 1985 and was later reprinted in 1991. Haraway claims that the cyborg - a creature created by the merging of the scientific and the organic - is a revolutionary, even liberating image of the future that transcends (techno-transcendence?) otherness through its hybridity, that is, through its ability to represent in one conceptual but also actual "being" the natural and the technological aspects of the human.
Haraway's manifesto marks the emergence of technofeminism as well as a revival of interest in ecofeminism. Her work bridges the gap in many ways between technofeminists and ecofeminists by placing her "ironic" vision of the cyborg, as transgressing the "boundary between human and animal," at the center of debates about post-natural, post-gendered subjectivity (Haraway 152).
As an ironic political metaphor that maps the intersections of technology and nature, the cyborg problematizes how we define "human." Is being human to be more technological than natural? What, if not technology, distinguishes us from other animals? If humans are defined by their uses of technology, in what ways can we still make claims about our "natural," biological selves. These and other questions related to understanding humans in relation to their natural and technological origins/influences are crucial to the studies of race, gender, and sexuality.
In Haraway's own words,
"Contemporary science fiction is full of cyborgs - creatures simultaneously animal and machine, who populate worlds ambiguously natural and crafted. Modern medicine is also full of cyborgs, of couplings between organism and machine, each conceived as coded devices, in an intimacy and with a power that was not generated in the history of sexuality. Cyborg 'sex' restores some of the lovely replicative baroque of ferns and invertebrates (such nice organic prophylactics against heterosexism). Cyborg replication is uncoupled from organic reproduction. Modern production seems like a dream of cyborg colonization work, a dream that makes the nightmare of Taylorism seem idyllic. And modern war is a cyborg orgy, coded by C3I, command-control-communication-intelligence, an $84 billion item in 1984's US defence budget. I am making an argument for the cyborg as a fiction mapping our social and bodily reality and as an imaginative resource suggesting some very fruitful couplings. 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 stakes in the border war have been the territories of production, reproduction, and imagination (Cyborg Manifesto 150-151)."
(see also Technoculture; see also Science Fiction)
The Human-Machine Alliance
Throughout The Ecology of Eden, Evan Eisenberg discusses several “alliances” between humans and other living organisms, mutually beneficial relationships between the two species. Interestingly Eisenberg also uses this same metaphor of alliance to illustrate the relationship between humans and machines.
He begins his discussion by defining what he calls “human saprophagy.” Since the use of fossil fuels, humans have become like mushrooms and other saprophagous organisms that feed off of dead or decaying matter. The fuel we use to power our machines is derived from organisms that “have been dead for millions of years.” Though we are different from other saprophages in that the energy we take from these organisms is processed outside of our bodies, we still depend on those organisms to provide the energy needed to complete tasks that would otherwise require an investment of our own. This is where machines become important.
Eisenberg believes that humans form alliances with machines in order to use the energy that is gathered from fossil fuels. Machines complete the tasks that would normally require humans to put in a lot of time, effort, and energy of their own, and in turn humans continue to “feed” them. For instance, a tractor allows a farmer to till large tracts of land with much less labor than a crew of humans with plows. However, as Eisenberg points out, what is harmful about this relationship is that the amount of energy invested in keeping the tractor running (fuel), is not equal to the amount of useful energy harvested from the crops (see intensification). Machines can be, like many other organisms, clever in their appeal to humans as allies. Where the tractor has an obvious purpose and product, other machines, such as video games and televisions, “nibble at our energy supplies without offering much in return,” (Eisenberg, 57).
Machines, according to this metaphor, are much like living species. Although machines do not evolve (yet) on their own, they follow the laws of evolution in a similar way because they co-evolve with humans. Human change and adaptation directly affects the evolution of machines that succeed. So they are, in fact, governed by Darwinian principles of natural selection and adaptation, through their mutual relationship with humans.
This metaphor is useful in understanding one aspect of how humans relate to machines, and how they affect our environment; however, it is problematic because it cannot address certain issues that we find ourselves dealing with. One is that machines are not, in fact, living things, but rather humans inventions. The way in which machines affect the environment is not something they do themselves, but rather is a reflection of their human inventors, yet we often act as if machines have minds of their own. Much Science Fiction acts as if machines are taking over, perhaps as a way to deny our own responsibility for the ecological disaster we bring about through our machines. This is where Eisenberg’s metaphor becomes difficult, because the way we view machines in relation to ourselves is important in how we view their effects on the world around us.