The Cyborg: Fifteen Years On, Five Complaints

Suhail Malik

Vol 1 #20, Summer 2001

We know what a cyborg is: the hybrid transfiguration of the human and the machine into one continuous, prosthetically extended, techno-organically enhanced whole. The hope of this integration is for a trans-organic or trans-human future, something like an entirely new evolutionary stage of life which will surpass the organic limitations of brain and body in favour of new, unlimited potentialities. A new sort of future, undermining the divisions and boundaries between the human and its others, a cross-disciplinary movement that, as Donna Haraway asserts in her foundational ‘Cyborg Manifesto’, has characterised liberal societies in postmodernity.

The cyborg is yet another manifestation of the collapse of the traditional, bounded stability of the human and its anthropocentric beliefs, but this notion of the cyborg is a lazy reconfiguration of already well-established political and moral sensibilities. Why?

1. It duplicitously welcomes the techno-scientific hybridisation of the organic and the technical while maintaining and perpetuating the critique of technological rationality which has characterised left-liberal activism and humanities. Neither aspect is transformed by what is, in fact, a confrontation but comes to exist side-by-side in a typically vague optimism in which all transgressions of boundaries are welcomed, without adequate consideration of content or the difficulties involved. In this way, the theory of the cyborg perpetuates the standard assumptions of leftist (and proto-hippy) critique.

2. This hypocritical determination serves only to reinforce equally naïve notions of an extended freedom and responsibility of which, rather, the cyborg is in the service. There is something disgustingly, liberally ‘communitarian’ about the cyborg in its current appreciation, which could readily be taken as a covert, if naïvely assumed, parochialism or, better, Americanism. No surprise that this should come from those on the Nice Left, where ‘contestation’ always involves ‘respect’ and ‘creativity’ rather than war and destruction (see Hardt and Negri’s approbation of Haraway in Empire).

3. Cyborg theory is mostly a self-serving, sexing-up of critical liberalism through great gadgetry and concept-busting movements in the techno-scientific organisation of living material and extended systems. Tie-dyed T-shirts are swapped for leather deathpants, and ethnic beads for prosthetic hardware in a desperate bid for contemporaneity.

4. But the errors and dogmatism of the now common notion of the cyborg also extend to the understanding of what is actually happening in the techno-sciences. The cyborg is a theoretical fiction, since how the machinic and the organic in fact materially interact and combine is not, and cannot be, accounted for by a theory ultimately based on abstractions.

5. This tendentious, primarily phantasmic appropriation of techno-scientific development as ‘cyborgian’ precludes a technically precise and fully inventive understanding of organico-machinic integration in favour of asserting what has been going on in well-meaning, left-liberal circles for some time anyway. It is a complacent reduction of the actuality of the organico-machinic nexus, dulling it into politically comprehensible and polite terms.