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The OED defines a cyborg as "a person whose physical tolerances or capabilities are
extended beyond normal human limitations by a machine or other external agency that
modifies the body's functions; an integrated man-machine system." The term emerged
as a blend of cyb[ernetic] - pertaining to Norman Weiner's cybernetics, "the entire field
of control and communications theory, whether in the machine or animal" - ad
org[anism] - "an organized body, consisting of mutually connecting and dependent parts
constituted to share a common life." The cyborg was a human, but its non-human
extensions make it something else entirely. Like Marshall McLuhan's "extensions of
man," the cyborg represents the relationship between organic bodies and media
technologies that extend either "bodies through space" or the "central nervous system
itself" (3).
The figure of the cyborg depends on a systems-based understanding of organisms. The
systems model draws an analogy between neural and cellular human physiology and the
electronic circuitry of computers. The brain acts like the central processing unit of the
body, directing and controlling the operation of its individual parts. A prosthetic can be
incorporated into this system and the brain will interact and synthesize with the
"machine of other external agency" to form a cyborg. The machine aspect of the cyborg
is a medium for the communication of human consciousness and the organic body of the
cyborg is a site of synthesis and integration.
As a hybrid creature, the cyborg has no parentage. In "A Cyborg Manifesto," Donna
Haraway suggested that "the cyborg has no origin story in the Western sense" (151-52).
However, the character of the cyborg originated out of the emergent field of cybernetics
in the 1960's. Manfred Clynes and Nathan Kline helped coin the term in 1960 as a
concept that would "allow man to optimize his internal regulation to suit the
environment he may seek" in outerspace (Clynes, 32). Along this line of history, cyborg
creations are positive additions to the human body that improve upon its capabilities.
Such instantiations of the cyborg might also include "anyone whose immune system has
been programmed through vaccination to recognize the polio virus" (Gray, Mentor,
Figueroa-Sarriera, 2-3). Along another line of history, the cyborg takes its origin from
Mary Shelley's Frankenstein . Frankenstein's monster is often cited as the first cyborg
(Gray, Mentor, Figueroa-Sarriera, 5). Not born of woman, Frankenstein assembled his
monster on the operating table. The history of the cyborg as monster evokes modern
society's "profound anxiety that we have lost control of, and may even be destroyed by,
the technology we have created in the modern age (Gusterson, 109).
Thus, two dominant types of cyborgs emerge in their history: the cyborg as a
reconceptualized post-human body and the cyborg as machine-controlled monster.
Because the cyborg is a symbiotic relationship between human and machine and is
equally faithful to its organic components and its machine attributes, its manifestations
vary according to which aspect is attributed dominance or materiality. At the same time,
When these attributes are rendered invisible, however, the cyborg identity suffers the
of pleasure and terror from the relationship between man and machine. Essentializing
human as body or as mind determines in part how the cyborg character is constructed.
Giving dominance to the machine or to the human (body or mind) determines how a
particular instantiation of the cyborg will perform. Part utopic fantasy and part
apocalyptic monster, part automaton and part autonomy, the cyborg is a synthesis - or
perhaps a dialectic, as Hayles proposes in "Virtual Bodies and Flickering Signifiers" between pattern and randomness.
Jessica Santone
Winter 2003