All about Cyborgs?
Remarks about "The Cyborg Handbook"
Are we all Cyborgs? The Handbook gives an overview about the emerging cyborg technologies. The hype about the cyborgs in this book is in the eyes of Richard Barbrook dominated from the american ideology, but it offers a good introduction into the coming world of man machine systems
The Cyborg Handbook is a collection of articles which attempt to explore how new military and medical advances are transforming what it means to be human. Back in 1960, the word cyborg - cybernetic organism - was invented to describe the merging of technology with the human body. In their seminal article reprinted in the book, Clynes and Kline first used the term to describe the technological enhancement of the human body for space travel. Employed by NASA, these two scientists proposed that a combination of drugs and surgery would enable humans to survive within the harsh environment of outer space.
Although never implemented, further articles describe how their vision has been partially realised by the US Air Force's expert computer systems which enhance the reaction times of pilots flying at supersonic speeds. As shown by Levidow and Robbins' examination of the Gulf War, American military superiority is now in part reliant on the deployment of these cyborg warriors. However the cyborg is not solely a military phenomenon. The articles by van Citters, Hori and Friedman examining the implantation of artificial organs and the use of reproductive technologies demonstrate how we now have cyborgs among our close friends - or we could even be one ourselves.
Yet, despite these introductory papers, the Cyborg Handbook is much more interested in the cyborg as science fiction rather than science fact. This book is a Cultural Studies text, not a scientific examination of the technological enhancement of the human body. In essays on characters from comics, the films of Arnold Schwarzenegger, the marketing of brain-mind machines and similar topics, various authors demonstrate how the cyborg has become a cultural icon of our age. Drawing on the pioneering work of Donna Haraway, academic theorists within this book try to reclaim the cyborg from the military-industrial complex. The cyborg fusion of technology and human can now take its place alongside transexuality, tatooing, scarification, piercing and other bodily modifications celebrated by contemporary popular culture. Instead of being a hi-tech killer, human-machines can be included within the rainbow coalition of women, gays & lesbians, people of colour and other marginalised people who reject the cultural conformity of mainstream America. The cyborg is now a post-modern cultural rebel.
However, in her Manifesto for Cyborgs (unfortunately not included within the book), Dona Haraway emphasised that: we are all cyborgs. According to her analysis, people with pacemakers, diabetics taking artificial insulin or even clubbers taking recreational drugs could all be described as living examples of the fusion between technology and humanity. Yet the universality of this vision of the cyborg challenges the dated post-modernist orthodoxy which dominates American Cultural Studies. In her article, Chela Sandoval attacks Haraway for not fully embracing the 'politics of difference' which emphasises the separateness of the various elements of the rainbow coalition. If the contemporary condition of every human inevitably involves some intimate relationship with technology, how can the cyborg be a subversive symbol of the marginalised members of society?
Sandoval's article is a classic example of how the post-modernist ideology hinders social analysis. Determined to enclose the cyborg within the limitations of American 'liberalism', she and other authors in the book refuse to recognise that the myth of the cyborg is but the latest stage in the human desire for self-improvement. For over two hundred years, Western theorists have been proclaiming the imminent arrival of the new man - the human transformed by the abolition of oppressive social conditions. For example, Charles Fourier - the early nineteenth century French socialist - believed that the creation of a harmonious society would lead to the emergence of an enhanced form of humanity. Just as present-day cyborg theorists dream of a hi-tech prosthesis, this early modernist hoped that in the future we would all be able to grow tails!
Because the parochialism of its predominantly American authors, The Cyborg Handbook will alternatively amuse and infuriate the European reader. Yet it is still an important publication - if only for its ability to mix Clynes and Kline's gung-ho vision of the cyborg with the post-modern feminism of writers like Sandoval. As evidenced by films, novels, comics and video games, the cyborg is likely to remain one of the most potent symbols of our own contemporary condition.
"The Cyborg Handbook", edited by Chris Hables Gray assisted by Heidi J. Figueroa-Sarriera and Steven Mentor, Routledge, London 1995. Paperback $ 22,95. 540 p.
Dr. Richard Barbrook is a member of the Hypermedia Research Centre of the University of Westminster.