Webliography-Q1

Cyborg is a word that consisted of cybernetic and organism. It was a term that firstly used by Manfred Clynes and Nathan K. Due to the new frontier of space exploration was beginning to take place, they started to think about the need for an intimate relationship between human and machine. Cyborg was used as a concept about human-machine systems in outer space.
Originally, a cyborg referred to a human being with bodily functions aided or controlled by technological devices, like artificial heart valve. But over the years, cyborg seemed to carry an uncomplicated meaning.


In“The End of the Human? The Cyborg Past and Present”, Carole M. Cusack mentioned the cyborg may be viewed as a violation of humanity’ s special status, but she also mentioned the cybrog is still human, “one of us” even though it is modified. Since the internet, artificial intelligence, and virtual reality become more and more important in our life, many humans are no longer entirely “natural”.
Contemporary academic researches argued against the cyborg’s transgression of boundaries. The cyborg against the stability or reality of the individual since it allows the reconstructions of personal identity. Cusack also examined a range of figures from Indo-European mythology to reveals that the melding of human and machine has been imagined far longer than it has been technologically realizable. The myths are useful to prove that cyborg are neither wholly technological not completely organic. The organic cyborg is naturally both flesh and metal, and she is intensely desirable because she combines the lust for riches with the desires of the flesh. The myths perform the function of connecting the imagination with real craft.

In The Cyborg, the Scientist, the Feminist and Her Critic”, Krista Scott criticized Haraway’s “Cyborg Manifesto” as it reveal the ambiguity and irrelevance of nature-culture binarisms in the cyborg age. I It is useful for me to argue the very dichotomous definition of cyborg.n the manifesto, Haraway attempts to create what she calls “an ironic political myth” which combines postmodernism with socialist feminism. Scott challenged Haraway does not limit her critique of an imagined “natural” to feminists as Haraway is consistent in her opposition to false organics in other fields, particularly the scientific.
Haraway mentioned that the feminists cannot use an imagined organic ontology as a point of politics or engage in “knee-jerk technophobi” because there simply isn’t such a “natural” self. Thus, for Haraway, the cyborg is the merger between nature and civilization. Refers to Scott’s article, the cyborg does not exist as nature or culture, but is rather a hybrid of both and more. The cyborg is not limited by traditional binarisms and dualist paradigms. The cyborg is polymorphous perversity. Haraway’s cyborg myth is about indiscriminate boundaries.


Justin Roby disagreed with William Gibson and Donna Haraway s’ views on cyborg in “Systematic Change: William Gibson, Monsters, Cyborgs, and Time”. Roby used the stories William Gibson tells to pull Gowther’s story into a new focus. This new focus helps me to criticize William Gibson and Donna Haraways’ views on cyborg led the sake of mere dichotomy.Gibson writes of historical hybridity as well as physical hybridity. Gibson sees space itself as allowing hybridity: fleshly and divine, the body has as much place in cyberspace as it does anywhere else. He developed a hybrid view of the world in which identity depends upon instability for its survival. Hence, the hybridity has become the norm, and attempts to make sense of it or control it are presented as intensely problematic in his novels. Both entities are infinitely removed from humanity, having the power to maintain their lines indefinitely. This indicates a new way of thinking about postmodern space-time in favor of subjects who are capable of navigating such complex structures.
And Roby also mentioned Haraway sees the cyborg as a deeply problematic entity as it is excess of technology and excess of time. Roby argued that such entities of excess are now more necessary than ever. He argued that the modern hybrids of technology, we ought not to be controlled or domesticated by Gibson’s philosophy and its resonances with Haraway’s argument. Hence, Roby tried to argue instead that new ways of organizing time and space enable new conceptions of the subject, the author, and identity.

In “Identity, Power, and Representation in Virtual Environments”, Frank Vander Valk used Second Life as a specific example. Valk’s point of view support my agreement that cyborg is still a transgressive figure.The real life norms governing the relationship between interpersonal distance and gaze are maintained in Second Life. The rules that govern our physical bodies in the real world have come to govern our embodied identities in the virtual world. Therefore, virtual life does not transcend real life, but rather mirrors it.
Thus, Valk challenges the view that virtual environments are reliably neutral venues for the creation of virtual identities that escape the culturally constructed power structures of the real world. Valk claims that the very dichotomy between real and virtual is itself questionable.
Valk though that the new technological developments oblige us to become transgressive mixtures of biology, technology, and code. The blurs and fragments boundaries and senses of self and place and functions as a virtual microcosm for cultural, economic and identity recombination.

Hari Kunzru used “a baddest girl on the block” as a metaphor of cyborg in “Bad Girl Versus the Astronaut Christ: The Strange Political Journey of the Cyborg”. The metaphor made by Kunzru provides examples that the cyborg’s meaning is complicated. “The structures revealed by her transgressive linking of supposedly-separate domains are precisely those which are most unpalatable to the vested interests of technocapital.”[1], for instance, the cyborg reminds us that a naked human body might be networked to gene patenting.
Yet, we may say the cyborg was designed to engineer man closer to God. We may regard cyborg as an “Astronaut Christ” due to its primary function as a transgressive figure. The cyborg operates by transgressing the regimes of signification. The cyborg is useful as long as it retains its power to transgress, and does not recede into a conventional articulation of anxieties about plastic surgery, AI, etc. The cyborg allows us to transcend physical limitations. Human can transcend own physical boundaries, we could attain a higher level of spiritual discipline.
According to Kunzru, cyborg forces us to situate thought in the body, and in turn to situate bodies in networks which contain elements of biology, politics, desire and technology. It produces continuities between these disparate strata, allowing us to think what would otherwise be unthinkable.

Over the years, cyborg has acquired different meanings. Cyborg can be used to characterize anyone who relies on a computer to complete their daily work when describing the dependence of human beings on technology. It also means “a cybernetic organism”, “a hybrid of machine and organism”, or “a creature of social reality as well as a creature of fiction”. Hence, cyborg seems to carry complicated meaning now.


[1] Hari, Kunzru. (1997) ‘Bad Girl Versus the Astronaut Christ: The Strange Political Journey of the Cyborg’, http://90.146.8.18/en/archiv_files/19971/E1997_100.pdf, (accessed 26 February 2009).

Reference:

1. Carole, M. Cusack. ‘The End of the Human? The Cyborg Past and Present’, http://escholarship.library.usyd.edu.au/journals/index.php/SSR/article/view/213/193, (accessed 26 February 2009).

2. Frank, Vander Valk. (2008) ‘Identity, Power, and Representation in Virtual Environments’, http://jolt.merlot.org/vol4no2/vandervalk0608.htm, (accessed 2 March 2009).

3. Hari, Kunzru. (1997) ‘Bad Girl Versus the Astronaut Christ: The Strange Political Journey of the Cyborg’, http://90.146.8.18/en/archiv_files/19971/E1997_100.pdf, (accessed 26 February 2009).

4. Justin, Roby. (2001) ‘Systematic Change: William Gibson, Monsters, Cyborgs, and Time’, http://www.janushead.org/gwu-2001/roby.cfm, (accessed 26 February 2009).

5. Krista, Scott. (1997) ‘The Cyborg, the Scientist, the Feminist and Her Critic’, http://www.stumptuous.com/cyborg.html, (accessed 28 February 2009).