cyborg

The era of the great mechanized individuals has begun, and all the rest is Paleontology."
(Umberto Boccioni, quoted in Banham, p. 102)

"What counts as human in this posthuman world?"
"The cyborg is our ontology; it gives us our politics." (Donna Haraway)

Cyborg is a neologism meaning cybernetic organism.

(see also prosthesis and automaton.)
Robocop's mirror phase

Is the cyborg an improved hybrid species that has the capacity to be humanity's evolutionary successor? This is the starting point for Manuel DeLanda's evocation of future "robot historians" writing the history of " War in the Age of Intelligent Machines." Warfare has been the primary arena for the technological development of cybernetics, but the cyborg has become a figure that brings toget her science fiction and technology in unexpected combinations. If the Terminator and Robocop exemplify some of the issues of aggression for a masculine image of the cyborg in the contemporary imagination, the concept has been developed in a feminist perspective as well.

In her influential"Cyborg Manifesto", Donna Haraway proposes the cyborg as a new figuration for feminist subjectivity. It is a hybrid, body- machine, a connection-making entity; a figure of interrelationality and global communication that deliberately blurs categorical distinctions (human / machine, nature / culture, male / female, Oedipal / non-Oedipal) emphasizing a network of differences and political accounts of constructed embodiments. According to Rosi Braidotti, the cyborg "is a way of thinking specificity without falling into relativism"-- It is Haraway's answer to the question of how femininists can reconcile the radical historical specificity of women with the insistence on constructing new values that can benefit humanity as a whole by redefining it radically. It is a counter paradigm, a post-metaphysical construct.

Katherine Hayles account of the cyborg stresses the separation of enacted body and the represented body. For Hayles, "this construction necessarily makes the subject into a cyborg, for the enacted and represented bodies are brought into conjunction through the technology that connects them." (How We Became Posthuman, p. xiii) (see embodiment ) Following Haraway, Hayles stresses that the cyborg is both a discursive and a technological construct. As a result, it "partakes of the power of the imagination as well as the actuality of technology." (How We Became Posthuman, p115)

Is the cyborg only a vehicle for the technological transcendence of a social crisis?

"'L'homme-type', the Modulor muscle-man, has through a combination of prosthetic devices, drugs, and body-sculpture, emerged as a Cyborg, a potentially gender-free mutant, and its home is no longer a house."
(Anthony Vidler, "Homes for Cyborgs")

cf "confusion of animate and inanimate" in fetish
see also automaton.