Cyborg as Posthuman?

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The cyborg is an interesting subject… within popular culture it has been positioned as specifically combining technology and biology, transgressing previously absolute boundaries between, “real”/synthetic, human/machine, living/dead. As is the case with all such transgressions, considerable misgivings and emotions are generated by the re-framing of these concepts. This is especially true when considering questions relating to the cyborg’s “danger” (or lack thereof) to human beings, the essence (or not) of its soul, and the consequent rights to life, freedom and self-determination that should be afforded the cyborg. Many of these questions echo debates that surrounded issues of slavery in previous centuries, calling to question the original conception of the ‘robot’ and re-casting it in the light of ‘slave’ labour, but they also reflect powerful and pervasive cultural concerns surrounding the “technological revolution” and its implications for “humanity”.

Katherine Hayles, in How We Became Posthuman (1999) reflects on this binary debate in her analysis of the three stages of the emergence of the posthuman. In the first period, the emphasis was on homeostasis and control. Isaac Asimov’s “Three Laws of Robotics”, the principles behind them and how they were later “taken up” in popular fiction, is a perfect illustration of this stage. Asimov’s laws defined the limits of robotic behaviour in terms of protecting human beings, this principle fell victim to Cold War paranoia, as stories followed portraying robots as beyond human control and as capable of great harm. Later, in the period of reflexivity, attitudes began to ease and so too did popular culture, exploring the implications for robots themselves. This period of “robot existentialism”, of their possessing life-like characteristics, can again be seen in Asimov’s (1976) ‘The Bicentennial Man’. As well, films like BladeRunner (1982) and Robocop (1987) explore the meaning, for cyborgs themselves, of their situation as creatures living on the boundary between the human and the machine. More recently, as we enter into Hayles’ third stage – the period of virtuality – the cyborg has assumed virtual form in stories like The Lawnmower Man (1992) and The Matrix(1999).

The cyborg narrative has progressed to a point where it is possible to consider that that, rather than being solely a “creation” of man, humans and machines have co-evolved. Humans have never enjoyed a relationship of mastery over their technological tools, but rather exist in a complex symbiotic relationship with them.

The concept of the cyborg makes it possible to explore imaginatively important issues about the nature of life, freedom, self-determination, the relationship of humanity to technology, and the transgression of fixed boundaries that previously had been regarded as vital to civilization. The cyborg is at once posthuman, and wholly human... it allows us space (a popular cultural space) to consider some kind of “posthuman-ness” but in terms and language that we can comprehend.

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