As my blog is titled “The Cyborg Apologist” I thought I should first discuss what, exactly, that meant. The immediate meaning is twofold: first, that I am an apologist for the idea of cyberization, for the idea of the cyborg as a good thing, a positive advancement of the human condition; and second that I am a cyborg, and an apologist for my own existence and the relevance of science and technological advancement as social forces. So we then have to answer the question of what a cyborg is. It will be difficult to be an apologist for a concept if we’re not on the same page as to what that concept implies.
Popular media has characterized the cyborg as a mostly-machine villain, human perhaps only in appearance as a disguise to carry out some nefarious robotic program. We need only look to movies such as the Terminator franchise (or more cheesy 80s b-movie in the Cyborg movie franchise… yes, franchise) to see this. Darth Vader is another good example. But in other fiction, cyborgs are not inherently evil. Frankenstein’s monster could be considered a cyborg, as a person built of flesh and science… but he, though flawed and scarred, was not evil (ignoring the popular monster movies, of course). The Replicants of Blade Runner may have been antagonists, but they were not evil by nature. In the Ghost in the Shell series, nearly everyone is a cyborg of some level, both hero and villain.
But what IS a cyborg? The dictionary defines it as a person whose physiological functioning is aided by or dependent upon a mechanical or electronic device. Others define it as a being with both biological and artificial parts. But that begs the question of where “being” and “physiological functioning” begin and end. And those are more difficult questions. Do we only include internal physiological functions via the dictionary definition or do things like sight, hearing and communication qualify? And where, by the second definition do the parts of a person end? Do we include a person’s wardrobe, their location, job, and tools? Can we distill a “person” to their flesh and blood body and brain sans everything else that they may use to interact with the world?
No, I do not believe we can. I do not believe that we can only include our internal organs and body parts as our only physiological functions. I do not believe that we can separate our actions, our creations, or our tools from what we consider to be our own being.
Georges Canguilhem, in a lecture given in 1947 called Machine and Organism, laid the groundwork of the idea that the human mind considers the tools it uses to be extensions of the body. A Hammer, once grasped, is no longer a hammer, but rather an extension of the arm that can now drive nails. Considering the ease with which anyone can use simple tools with little to no training, this idea is not so revolutionary as one might think. The idea of tools as organs becomes even more striking when we look at items such as eyeglasses and contact lenses, telescopes and microscopes, microphones and hearing aids, perfumes and deodorants, or more strikingly: artificial limbs, heart valves and joints.
If we consider our “selves” to be only that which we need to survive, and nothing more, then we would still need to include clothing and shelter. Remove those and the human being cannot live except in very small zones near the equator (that we originated in such places is thus no surprise, but I digress). But if we also consider that human society is a necessary part of the human condition, that it is inseparable from what makes us human then we must include the trappings thereof; Religion, philosophy, churches, schools, our books and our stories, our governments and our buildings, our homes and our transportation, our phones and our computers. All of these are necessary parts of our current human society. We could get rid of a lot of it and survive, as a minimal requirement, but many would not survive the removal of modern “convenience,” and the very idea of human society would be irrevocably changed. How well do you think your average CPA can hunt, gather or farm for food? How necessary would his skills be in an agrarian society?
Another author whose work has informed my view is Annemarie Mol, through her book The Body Multiple. In it she posits a theory of ontology (the study of how things “be”, or how they can be said to exist) that requires interaction, or as she puts it: enactment. The idea is that we cannot separate what something is from the context in which it exists. We cannot purify it down to some conceptual “natural” objective reality, because such a state doesn’t exist. We cannot separate the man from all of the things that he enacts each day: his family, his clothes, his job, car, house, etc. To do so would be to strip him of what makes him… him.
So, if we cannot separate the person from the items he uses – and we accept that the mind considers what we use as parts of ourselves – then where are we with regard to the original question? What is a cyborg? Well, we are cyborgs. We all of us have artificial parts that perform physiological functions. In fact, ever since the first proto-human picked up a stick to club his lunch we have been cyborgs. We have been taught to consider the blending of human and machine as other, as unnatural, as scary, as human hubris gone too far. But if we just look around at the amount of machine that we require to live our daily lives, even if those machines may not reside within our flesh, we can see that it is not so scary, it is not unnatural (our machines have grown along with our understanding, our society, and ourselves as humans, in a completely organic way), and it is not other. It is us.
We are.
Comments, constructive criticism and all things related are welcomed below. Next week I will delve more deeply into the idea that I quickly passed over here: existence as interaction. Join me for a look at the Theory of Relational Ontology. Then for an examination of why we fear the idea of cyberization in The Big Bad Wolf: Losing our Humanity.
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