Star Trek by Duncan Barrett Michèle Barrett

Author:Duncan Barrett, Michèle Barrett [Duncan Barrett, Michèle Barrett]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781138699601
Barnesnoble:
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Published: 2016-09-01T00:00:00+00:00

The human/machine interface

The term ‘cyborg’ is usually thought of as a contraction of ‘cybernetic organism’. Often this means the idea of a hybrid between an organic, flesh-and-blood entity and something mechanical or artificial. The iconic text of cyborg studies, Donna Haraway’s immensely influential ‘A Manifesto for Cyborgs’, takes off from this definition: ‘A cyborg is a cybernetic organism, a hybrid of machine and organism, a creature of social reality as well as a creature of fiction.’109

People speak of medical technologies that involve replacement parts or prostheses in the vocabulary of the cyborg. The image of the cyborg is often that of a human body to which mechanical implants of some kind have been added (as is the case with the Borg). A second popular image is the cyborg of the first Terminator film: basically a machine, to which human skin, hair and so on have been added for verisimilitude. Star Trek’s Data is somewhat like this – he is an automaton, but made to resemble a man as much as possible, with the exception of his yellow eyes and shiny, metallic gold skin tone. According to the definition of a cyborg as a ‘hybrid’, however, Data cannot accurately be described as one. (At least not until the Borg Queen grafts organic skin onto him in First Contact.)

This definition of a cyborg as a (hu)man/machine hybrid is one based on recent custom and practice. There is nothing wrong with that; words mean what we use them for. But if we are to start making rulings on what is or is not a cyborg – as many writers in the literature do110 – it might be helpful to take a step back and look at the history of the two terms that have been brought together to make this new word.

Rather surprisingly, the two elements of ‘cyborg’ do not really generate the popular meaning. ‘Cyber’ is now officially recognised as meaning anything to do with computers. The dictionary tells us that it is a twentieth-century back formation from ‘cybernetics’,111 a term coined by Norbert Wiener in the 1940s, from the Greek kubernetes (steersman), as the study of control systems that exhibit similarities to those of human and animal behaviour. Before its restriction to the field of computing, cybernetics was a ‘broad based discipline’.112 The connotations of ‘cyber’ as non-human, non-organic, as computer-related, and ‘virtual’, are comparatively recent.

And what is an organism? It is certainly not defined by its flesh-and-bloodiness – although the ‘living animal or plant’ is one of the definitions, the idea of a system, or organisation of interdependent parts (which could be mechanical as opposed to alive) is equally important.113 Organic thus refers to a structure and system; an ‘organic’ intellectual for Gramsci was not one who was alive but one whose ideas were integrally related to their historical social situation. An organism can be something like a living being, without being alive itself.

If we put these two terms together, we arrive at something far more complex than a human being with an artificial joint, or a machine covered in human skin.

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