Sarah's E-learning and Digital Cultures Blog

I have been collecting definitions of cyborgs to see if I can get a handle on the concept at the very basic level of ‘what exactly is a cyborg?’

The orginal term ‘cybog’ is widely accredited to Manfred E Clynes & Nathan S Kline  in a paper regarding how a man may exist in space.

“What are some of the devices necessary for creating self-regulating manmachine systems? This self-regulation must function  without the benefit of consciousness in order to cooperate with the bodys own autonomous homeostatic controls. For the exogenously extended organizational complex functioning as an integrated homeostatic system unconsciously, we propose the term “Cyborg. The Cyborg deliberately incorporates exogenous components extending the self- regulatory control function or the organism in order to adapt it to new environments. If  man in space, in addition to flying his vehicle. must continuously be checking on things and making adjustments merely in order to keep himself alive, he becomes a slave to the machine. The purpose of the Cybogy, as well as his own homeostatic system, is to provide an organizational system in which such robot-like problems are taken care of automatically and unconsciously, leaving man free to explore, to create, to think, and to feel.” Manfred E Clynes & Nathan S Kline Cyborgs and space (1960)

Haraway states that from a technological point of view, any person that associates themselves with technology and uses it at almost any level is a cyborg.

“A cyborg is a cybernetic organism, a hybrid of machine and organism, a creature of social reality as well as a creature of fiction. Social reality is lived social relations, our most important political construction, a world-changing fiction. The international women’s movements have constructed ‘women’s experience’, as well as uncovered or discovered this crucial collective object. This experience is a fiction and fact of the most crucial, political kind. Liberation rests on the construction of the consciousness, the imaginative apprehension, of oppression, and so of possibility. The cyborg is a matter of fiction and lived experience that changes what counts as women’s experience in the late twentieth century. This is a struggle over life and death, but the boundary between science fiction and social reality is an optical illusion.” Haraway; a cyborg manifesto pg 34

According to Chris Hables Gray in his book Cyborg citizen: politics in the posthuman age:

“A cyborg is a self-regulating organism that combines the natural and artificial together in one system. Cyborgs do not have to be part human, for any organism/system that mixes the evolved and the made, the living and the inanimate, is technically a cyborg. This would include biocomputers based on organic processes, along with roaches with implants and bioengineered microbes.”Chris Hables Gray  Cyborg citizen: politics in the posthuman age pg 2

and

“If you have been technologically modified in any significant way, from an implanted pacemaker to a vaccination that reprogrammed your immune system, then you are definitely a cyborg. Even If you are one of those rare people who are in no way a cyborg in the technical sense, cyborg issues still impact you. We live in a cyborg society; no matter how unmodified we are as individuals.” Chris Hables Gray  Cyborg citizen: politics in the posthuman age pg 2

During an interview with World.information.org he stated

“Anyone who has been vaccinated is technically a cyborg, because their immune system has been reprogrammed to deal with certain stimulae, as if they were computers.” Interview with Chris Hables Gray

Gray uses the term posthuman and cyborg interchangeably.

So what can we decipher from these eminent academics? Is a cyborg someone who is flesh and bone, but has one or more robotic appendages electronically linked to his or her nervous system? Would the defining point fall when a cyborg is said to be half human and half machine? For example, the Terminator is a robot covered with human tissue and so is not a cyborg because he doesn’t have any bones? Is a human with removable artificial limb a cyborg? Or is a cyborg someone who has had a flu jab, or used an I-phone?

I open this one to the floor!