Cyborgs

A cyborg is an organism that is part flesh, part artificial, and a popular character of science fiction. Well-known examples are Arnold Schwarzenegger's flesh-covered robot Terminator, the Frankenstein creature, and the androids of Blade Runner. The cyborg has often been used as a metaphor to point to potential risks involved in letting machines take over human functions. They have visually embodied the unknown future and have been used to symbolize transformations of different kinds. Intrigued by such transformatory characteristics, cultural theorists have turned to the symbolic values of the cyborg figure. The uncertainties surrounding this figure have been used to question concepts of human and nonhuman. The cyborg—caught in between culture and nature—doesn't necessarily have to deal with the social orders of our time and carries a potential to reconceptualize social relations and identities, it has been argued. Neither completely technological nor completely organic, cyborgs disrupt distinctions between natural and technologically enhanced bodies. In consumer culture theory, the cyborg has been used both as an abstract concept for questioning identity and difference and in more applied ways. The body's interplay with information technologies and machines, such as in online games, the appearance of virtual bodies, or use of cell phones have been theorized as prostheses or formations of new kinds of human bodies. Cyborg theory can also be used to theoretically understand consumers' physical relationship with consumer goods, such as fashion and food, and offer new ways of approaching processes such as branding and digital forms of marketing.

Used as a critical concept, cyborg is generally associated with Donna Haraway and her 1991 text “A Cyborg Manifesto.” Haraway's text was in part written as response to strands of feminism where technology was problematized as building on masculine and patriarchal values. Even though she, too, [Page 410]recognized such value constructions, she wanted to give an alternative view. The development of information technology has made us all into cyborgs, she argues, we are all human, and not natural, creations. All identity categories such as gender, sexuality, class, ethnicity or race, are too, in Haraway's view, human and not natural creations. As a concept, cyborg points to the shifting power relations that are involved in identity constructions and has become a metaphor for feminists who question distinctions between nature and culture, sex and gender, and male and female. Above all, the concept has been used to illustrate the ways in which advanced technological developments have blurred the boundaries between “natural” human bodies and “artificial,” “manufactured,” or “machinelike” human bodies. Cyborgs are, according to Haraway, hybrid entities with no natural origin or identity

The human body is, in this view, a material entity as well as a discursive process. Also associated with the concept cyborg is N. Katherine Hayles, who in her book How We Became Post Human provides a critical account of the ways in which science has made human subjectivity synonymous with a disembodied mind. In the age of DNA, computers, and artificial intelligence, the body is seen as excess “meat,” she argues. Information is becoming disembodied as the “bodies” that once carried it vanish into virtuality. Consciousness has become separated from the body, a condition she calls posthuman. Hayles investigates the cultural processes that have made a posthuman condition possible and questions the separation of matter and information. Similar to Haraway, Hayles also shows how becoming posthuman can be liberating.

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