We Are Cyborgs

From Robo Culture Wiki

[edit] This paper's title, "We Are Cyborgs," is a reference to Devo's first album, Q: Are We Not Men? A: We Are Devo! Are cyborgs then, EVOLUTION versus devolution? Feel free to scroll down and click play on the YouTube clip for some alien sound as you read this!

---

Donna Haraway, in “A Cyborg-Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century,” states, “The cyborg is a creature in a post-gender world; it has no truck with bisexuality, pre-oedipal symbiosis, unalienated labour, or other seductions to organic wholeness through a final appropriation of all the powers of the parts into a higher unity” (Haraway 151). To Haraway, a cyborg, or a cybernetic organism, breaks down boundaries and maps, or rewrites, our social or bodily reality (Haraway 150). It is this blurring of set boundaries, or regulations, that needs to exist in order for such hybrid figures to emerge. Considering Haraway, I examine how in Ridley Scott’s Alien (1979) identity is redefined thus becoming a new fiction, or a new construction. I further analyze how the feminine space is reconstructed through the blending of the organic and the technological as is depicted through the Mothership, the Alien Queen, and Ellen Ripley (Sigourney Weaver).

According to Sigmund Freud, a child learns about his or her origins through watching or fantasizing about his or her parents copulating, which he refers to as the primal scene. Freud argues that if the act is actually observed the child “adopt[s] what may be called a sadistic view of coition” (Creed 128). However, “[i]f the child perceives the primal scene as a monstrous act – whether in reality or fantasy – it may fantasize animals or mythical creatures as taking part in the scenario” (Creed 128). Barbara Creed, in “Alien and the Monstrous-Feminine,” states that the re-working of the primal scene is “one of the major concerns of science-fiction horror film” (Creed 129). Ripley’s Alien opens allowing the spectator to re-live the primal scene by being inside the m(other)’s body. First observed in Ridley Scott’s Alien is, of course, a space ship (Nostromo) in which the film’s narrative takes place. Significantly, the ship’s “life support system is a computer” is called Mothership, or simply Mother (Creed 129). Soon after learning the name of the ship the spectator is taken on a tour of the inside of the mother. The tunnels that the camera follows can be said to eerily resemble fallopian tubes of the Mothership, or the m(other), who is positioned as a hybrid of the organic and the technological “other.” Creed states, that the scene could be “interpreted as a primal fantasy in which the human subject is born fully developed – even copulation is redundant” (Creed 129). The film is introduced through the rewriting of bodily realities through the ambiguous hybrid depiction of the Mothership, which, as the cyborg, is given subjectivity despite ambivalently being a space ship.

Boundaries in Alien are further broken through the impregnation of a male, Kane (John Hurt), by an alien which not only alters his male body but also constructs him a cyborg through the coupling of his organism and the alien or machine. Haraway states, “[c]yborg replication is uncoupled from organic reproduction. Modern production seems like a dream of cyborg colonization work” (Haraway 150). Kane is penetrated and impregnated by an alien leaving an egg in him; the impregnation occurs through the mouth and Kane dies after his cyborg offspring is born through his stomach. Barbara Creed refers to Kane’s death as transgression for “peer[ing] into the egg/womb” [or chamber in the space ship] in order to investigate its mysteries. In peering, he becomes ‘part’ of the primal scene, taking the place of the mother, the one who is penetrated, the one who bears the offspring of the union” (Creed 130). Kane’s death works as a punishment for getting too intimate with the alien’s womb, or getting too close to the machine, which illustrates Haraway’s cyborg myth “about transgressed boundaries, potent fusions, and dangerous possibilities” (Haraway 154). Kane is impregnanted challenging what being sexed a male is traditionally understood as.

Considering Laura Mulvey’s “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” Kane attains a pleasure in looking inside the mother ship, for which [to reiterate] he gets punished. As Freud may perhaps state, by gazing at the primal scene Kane takes the position of the child that is “curious about about other people’s genital and bodily functions, about the presence or absence of a penis and, retrospectively, about the primal scene” (Mulvey 37). He posesses the controlling and curious gaze, however, it is interesting to note that acording to Mulvey such a gaze belongs to the active male. Kane challenges that position as he gets impregnantd by the alien, which “de-sexes” him by penetrating and impregnating him. Not only does he take the biological pregnancy role of the female but also through copulation with a machine that leaves us to wonder whether the copulation makes him a cyborg, or a new fiction and construction.

Akin Kane, the alien itself is also presented as as ambiguous through the blending of corresponding gender and sex that it exemplifies. Judith Butler, in “Performative Acts and Gender Constitution: An Essay in Phenomenology and Feminist Theory,” proposes the idea that sex like gender are historical products “which have become conjoined and refined as natural over time” (Butler 276). Meaning that, if gender is “is in no way a stable identity or locus of agency from which various acts proceede (sic); rather, it is an identity tenuously constituted in time – an identiity constituted through a stylized repetition of acts” and sex cannot exist without gender (and vise versa) then sex is also constructed, both of which then are “performative accomplishment(s)” (Butler 48). The Queen Alien, like Kane, is also presented as “the other” whose title “Queen,” a female, does not correspoond with the acts of penetrating and impregnating. Kane and the Alien Queen are switching historical (reiterated) roles of what each sex’s acts are traditionally known for, which proposes that sex is a construct.

The relationship between the Alien Queen, whose egg impregnanted Kane as she is the only fertile alien, and the human Ellen Ripley also blurs boundaries and re-writes realiy. Ripley, who does not succesfully get any advice from the Mothership decides to combat the Alien Queen by actively becoming a cyborg herself. Significantly, here we see Ripley, a human, who is positioned as the daughter of a cyborg, not only is he Mothership asked for advice, like a mother, but the ship is repatedly referred to as “mother.” The question that is therefore posed are whether Ripley is metaphorically a cyborg herself through being the “offspring” of a machine. As the film nears to an end Ripley gets inside a while astronaut-like costume, an exoskeleton, and holds a gun in her hand to bring the Queen to an end. Riple, costumes herself as a cyborg like figure and she needs to extend her body, as Marshall McLuhan would perhaps state, in order to match the deadly Queen Alien. Ripley blends her organic self with technology which is ultimately the only way in which she is able to destroy the Alien Queen. She therefore also becomes a cyborg (like Kane), and her sex is also challenged through the visual means of holding a gun (phallus).

Ripley extends her body through the additive of the phallus in order to combat the alien Queen , which constructs her to challenge the notion of sex as natural. Clearly through her choice of performance, sex is despicted as being fluid and changeable as gender. Thus, her and Kane (both initially introduced as humans) have not only become cyborgs but also they created new fictions of sex as is evident through Ripley’s phallus and Kane’s impregnation. It is Kane now that has the “bleeding wound” like the castrated woman and Ripley does not symbolize “the castration threat by her lack of a penis” as, according to Muley, women stand for (Mulvey 35).

According to Donna Haraway in “A Cyborg-Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the late Twentieth Centuty,” a cyborg transgresses boundaries and reality. Such blurring of truth is made apparent in Alien through the deconstructions and reconstructions of identity. I introduced this paper by referring to Creed’s arguments about the film as allowing the spectator to be inside the mother’s body. Later I spoke about Kane as being punished for being too close with the alien’s womb, which was followed by a discussion of Ripley’s constructing. I therefore ask, are the spectators of the film then also being constructed as cyborgs by Ridley Scott? Do we also transgress and want to peek into the womb, like Kane, to see how impregnation, or implantation, occurs? Are we are all hybrids of machine and organism?

[edit] Food for Thought

To shift focus from the film I would like to discuss how our current “reality” is constructed, or rather how we are able to construct realities through technology. Like Ripley was able to extend her body through her costume, we are able to alter ourselves. Haraway considers video games as producing “gendered imaginations” as well as “imaginations that can contemplate destructions of the planet and sci-fi escape from its consequences” (Haraway 168), albeit true, Haraway’s essay was published in 1985 and since then many things have changed. Let us consider the newer technology of the Internet, where not only gendered imaginations, or identities, can be produced, but also sex, sexuality, and ultimately a whole new life style that one claims to be may in fact be a fiction when in the ‘private’ domain.

[edit] References

Alien. Dir. Ridley Scott, 1979.

Butler, Judith. "Performative Acts and Gender Constitution: An Essay in Phenomenology and Feminist Theory" from Performing Feminisms: Feminist Critical Theory and Theatre. Sue-Ellen Case, ed., Pp. 270-282, John Hopkins University Press, 1990.

Creed, Barbara. "Alien and the Monstrous Feminine." Alien Zone: Cultural Theory and Contemporary Science Fiction Cinema. Ed. Annette Kuhn. London: Verso, 1990. 128-141

Haraway, Donna. "A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century." Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature. New York: Routledge, 1991. 149-181.

Mulvey, Laura. "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema." Feminism and Film. Ed. E. Ann Kaplan. New York: Oxford University Press, 2000. 34-47.