Critical Annotated Webliography - George

1. Cyborgs are hybrid entities that are neither wholly technological nor completely organic, which means that the cyborg has the potential not only to disrupt persistent dualisms [in language and thought]…but also to refashion our thinking. (Balsamo) drawing on current scholarly work, discuss ways in which the cyborg is still a transgressive figure.

In the late twentieth century, technology plays an important role in our lives. It is not only affects our habits and behaviors, but also our bodies. Nowadays, technology merges us is not a myth due to it becomes a part of our daily lives. For example, physically incapacity people have to rely on the technologies to continue their lives, and the term “cybernetic organism” (cyborg) is no more only appears on the contemporary science fictions currently.

This book by Steven Seidman quotes one of the writing by Donna Hararway that titled “A Manifesto for Cyborgs: Science, Technology, and Socialist Feminism in the 1980s’” that suggests an idea “we are all chimeras” to indicate that we are combined by human bodies and machines together. And now cyborgs are not only a dream or imagination in our minds and science fictions. Because of the technology development, “biotechnologies” could re-craft our organic bodies. Therefore, our bodies become translated to be codes and information devices that could be read by machines. As a result, there are no more boundaries to distinguish what is organism and mechanism. Due to the combination of human and machine, Donna Haraway points out there will be a struggle over life and death. In consequence, this article is seemingly related to the topic, but there are a great number of pages to explain the effects to the society and the female especially the later one. As a result, it would not very suitable for this argument because it does not provide enough evidences to support the idea of cyborg.

According to the writing by Philip Mirowski, he first points out where the term “cyborg” comes from. Then he claims “the cyborg sciences do seem congenitally incapable of avoiding excessive hype”. And he suggests an example that artificial intelligence promoters occupied in a wicked rhetoric about “meat machines”, which is, a human body that is surrounded by meat and skin and the core is metal. Then he says that the cyborg intervention agglomerates a heterogeneous assemblage of human and machines, the living and the dead. Again, it signifies that humanity has been rendered more machinelike. This piece of writing is not totally fitting in the case because most of the content is talking about science and military. Besides, it does not mention about how cyborg challenges our traditional ways of thinking to the technology.

The article wrote by David Bell addresses some text works from William Gibson, who wrote a number of science fictions; contain the influences of “cyberpunk” literature. In Gibson’s works, they usually bring out the cyborg transformations that reconstitute the organic and sensorial architecture of the human body. After that, the author says these “part human, part cybernetic systems” are the sites of usual manifestations of technological exchange and technological advantage. Also these cyborg organisms can be considered as “technophilic” from a number of points of view. The technophilic body is the products that compose of techniques and technologies that are used for various aesthetic manipulations of the body surface, including cosmetically redesigned faces, muscles grafts, and animal and/or human transplants.And the cyberculture provides arenas for the cyborgs reconstruction of human organisms according to the different, cosmopolitan, synthetic architectures. Therefore, the disembodied human consciousness is then able to simultaneously traverse the vast cyberpsychic spaces of this global information matrix.According to this article, it would be more proper for this topic due to it is more concentrated in the relationship between human body and machine that we call cyborg and cyberculture.

What Chris Gray’s article says is that cyborg also refers to medical thinking, which is about skin surgery, medical operation of internal organs. Also cyborg technology helps the disabilities to rehabilitate because they could depend on the equipments. So that the machines become a part of even the most moments of the patients’ lives. And it overcomes the fears of machinery and their learned rehabilitation ethic allows them to become free from hospital and to become active citizen again. Machine integration and an improving quality of life can lead to growing independence and activity. Besides, people who are ”brain-dead” that their hearts are still beat naturally, machines could take its place while their heart were stopped that is called “non-heart-beating cadaver”. Moreover, some hospitals are allowed to treat the kidneys of newly dead patients in a solution to make them better transplant organs before obtaining permission for the organ’s use. Thus far this article is a useful one for this argument because it provides many examples and issues that about the blurred boundary between human and machine.

Then Matthew Gandy first identifies in his piece of work that what is “cyborg” in his writing, it is represented in science fiction cinema, is not an automaton or robot but a complicated construction that terrorizes our understanding of what should be a human being. It could say that it is related to a combination of bodies and machines but is nonetheless a way of thinking about the cyber-world. The latent applications of the cyborg concept have proliferated to include developments such as whole organism cloning, in vitro fertilization, DNA sequencing, advanced prosthetics and other sophisticated medical technologies. And it is extended through writing, cinema and the fantasy spaces of contemporary culture. Since its inception as a critical intellectual concept in the 1980s the cyborg metaphor has been deployed to challenge disembodied, dualistic, masculinist and teleological bodies of knowledge. If we could recognize the cyborg is a cybernetic creation, a hybrid of machine and organism, then urban network can be considered as a series of interconnecting life-support systems. In accordance with this article, it is chiefly related to the main argument of this topic. What he argues is that the merge of human and machine is challenging our traditional thinking towards technology.

To conclude, cyborg is a contemporary term in the late twentieth century, and now it is not only appears in the science fictions or movies, but it becomes true in the reality world. Towards this subject, the article from Matthew Gandy would be more appropriate to this matter.

---

Seidman, Steven. The Postmodern Turn: New Perspectives on Social Theory. Cambridge: University Press, 1994. 82-113. <http://books.google.com/books?hl=en&lr=&id=nUK2Lz0zR4cC&oi=fnd&pg=PA82&dq=cybernetic+organism&ots=cKVeeQUKO8&sig=g_9JIDsVDHtDu6iKmJDsfYINLr8>

Mirowski, Philip. “Anatomy of a Cyborg.” Machine Dreams: Economics Becomes a Cyborg Science. Cambridge: University Press, 2002. 11-18. <http://books.google.com/books?hl=en&lr=&id=GkrYxL0QtpcC&oi=fnd&pg=PR11&dq=cyborg&ots=2Hh-3DTzGf&sig=NdWC3I3K_VGST7MVxrk-hA-X3Ms#PPA11,M1>

Bell, David. “The Technophilic Body: On technicity in William Gibson’s cyborg culture.” The Cybercultures Reader. London, UK: Routledge, 2000. 175-189 <http://books.google.com/books?hl=en&lr=&id=MKtr_svfY1kC&oi=fnd&pg=PA175&dq=cyborg&ots=9duEkN06GF&sig=-BSn_R0lCF1lLlD1e2bI9Oak6xo>

Gray, Chris. “Enabled cyborgs, living and dead.” Cyborg Citizen: Politics in the posthuman age. New York: Routledge, 2002. 99-112 <http://books.google.com/books?hl=en&lr=&id=2Mw5srL_bAUC&oi=fnd&pg=PA1&dq=cyborg&ots=Za6halt0uJ&sig=MliX-oFXDuk8ldreDUbfjow2iII#PPA99,M1>

Gandy, Matthew. Cyborg Urbanization: Complexity and Monstrosity in the Contemporary City. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, Vol. 29, No. 1. (March 2005), pp. 26-49. <http://www.geog.ucl.ac.uk:8080/print-version/about-the-department/people/academics/matthew-gandy/files/pdf1.pdf>