Cyborg Ecologies

The term cyborg ecologies, along with the allied notions of hybrids and nature-cultures, describes the view that the world is made up of both human and nonhuman networks. More specifically, it suggests that we must pay both empirical and theoretical attention to the connections among the biophysical, social, discursive, and technical elements of any given event, object, subject, idea, or thing.

This idea emerged in response to two different theoretical stances. First, cyborg ecologies sought to challenge the long-standing separation of nature from culture, or the notion that nature is a biophysical reality, while culture is a human construction. The concept is intended to disassemble the presumed unities of nature, culture, and technology, asserting that the world has always been made up of assemblages of animals, humans, and machines. Through this assertion, the boundaries between nature and culture, animal and human, and object and subject are unsettled. Moreover, the notion of cyborg ecologies is also on the forefront of a return to the material in the face of the so-called cultural turn in geography and its cognate disciplines, which emphasized the role of discourse in constituting the world. Thus, discourse became a primary analytical tool to explain “Nature” as a cultural container for ideas about wilderness, race, class, gender, sexuality, empire, and the like rather than a biophysical reality. While the “cultural turn” provided important insights into the way power works by making some things appear natural, it also evacuated the nonhuman from a discussion of nature, as animals and plants become yet another power effect produced through discourse. This perspective left out a whole range of nondiscursive practices, such as those of animals, plants, viruses, or technologies, for example, which, although they do not speak, can exercise their own particular forms of agency and are able to attach themselves to networks in unpredictable ways.

Using examples such as the ozone hole, nanotechnology, and mad cow disease as heuristics, ideas about cyborg ecologies insist on the recognition that the boundaries between nature and culture have always been porous and the effort to draw distinctions between these two realms is suspect. The concept of cyborg ecologies emphasizes the endless but always contingent networks among various agents such as animals, plants, discourses, technologies, and humans.

The scholarship that uses the idea of cyborg ecologies draws on the work of science studies scholars such as Donna Haraway and Bruno Latour. Although the cyborg, or cybernetic organism, has long been a feature of both science fiction and social theory, it is with Haraway's seminal 1985 text “A Cyborg Manifesto” (expanded and reprinted in 1991 in Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature) that the term gained substantial currency in geography. In response to both the binaries found in much scholarship of the time and their manifestations in feminist thinking, Haraway borrowed the notion of the cyborg as a means to think through the interconnections between the synthetic and the organic—a playful and ironic figure that disrupts neat categories. She uses the cyborg as a political metaphor that insists on partiality, contingency and also the relationality between animals and machines. This also finds common cause with the actor network scholarship of Latour. In his book We Have Never Been Modern (1993), Latour asserts that modernity is made up of two interrelated processes: purification and mediation. He contends that purification is the practice of bracketing the human (or culture) from the nonhuman (or nature), but this practice can only be supported by the work of mediation, that is, the proliferation of hybrids—in other words, Haraway's cyborgs.

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