Even Better than the Real Thing? ~ 1.1

A lot of the technological gadgets available on the consumer market today are not simply designed to be useful tools which help the individual communicate and function in the modern world, they are also fashion statements. The mobile phone, the laptop, the portable media player one owns is a statement about who that person is. Consequently just like any other fashion, technology has its trends, remodelling, rebranding, its next-best-thing. Jean Baudrillard argues in his philosophical treatise Simulacra and Simulation that machines and technology are “destined to become the organic body of man.”[1] Therefore the human “body itself is nothing but a medium”[2] for technology, that which merges the organic and machine, and thus begins the rise of the cyborg.

Possibly the most influential theory on the cyborg is Donna Haraway’s 1985 essay titled A Cyborg Manifesto. She describes the cyborg so;

“By the late twentieth century, our time, a mythic time, we are all chimeras, theorised and fabricated hybrids of machine and organism; in short, we are all cyborgs. The cyborg is our ontology; it gives us our politics.”[3]

The figure of the cyborg therefore challenges our existence, and “threatens fundamental boundaries that have long structured ways of understanding the world”[4] such as; human and animal, organism and machine, physical and non-physical. Haraway also claims that the cyborg is “a creature of social reality as well as a creature of fiction”,[5] which suggests that the fictional cyborg is very influential in constructing notions of what a ‘real’ cyborg in the postmodern world could potentially evolve into.

Haraway’s theory of the cyborg as the ultimate symbol of the postmodern self is epitomised in Neuromancer, where “the human and the technological overlap nearly endlessly.”[6] One of the advancements available in Gibson’s fictional society is a technology called microsoft. A microsoft is a microchip that is connected to the central nervous system and the brain via a cybernetic implant behind the ear. Multiple microsofts can be plugged in behind the ear at any given time, and each microsoft gives the user instant access to information or abilities that specific chip holds, for as long as that chip remains plugged in.[7] For example a Chinese language microsoft allows the user to temporarily speak fluent Chinese. The ability acquired from the microsoft is artificial, in that it is temporary and the individual never truly acquires the skill. Using Baudrillard’s argument, the technological here is using the human body as its vessel, its medium.[8]

None of Gibson’s characters in Neuromancer “possess any inherent resistance to the incursion of the artificial in their bodies or lives”,[9] perhaps none more so than Molly, the razorgirl. She is the most explicit depiction of a cyborg, having merged her body with technology. Her eyes have been surgically replaced with mirrored lenses; “the glass was surgically inset, sealing her sockets. The silver lenses seemed to grow from smooth pale skin above her cheekbones.”[10] She also has had blades inserted instead of her fingernails; “she held out her hands, palms up, the white fingers slightly spread, and with a barely audible click, ten double-edged, four-centimeter scalpel blades slid from their housings beneath the burgundy nails.”[11] These alterations make Molly a consummate assassin. This echoes Haraway’s argument that “the main trouble with cyborgs ... is that they are the illegitimate offspring of militarism ... But illegitimate offspring are often exceedingly unfaithful to their origins.”[12] Here Haraway seems to be referring to the fact that it is the military government sectors that are always developing new technological weapons. Bodily enhancements, such as Molly’s fictitious razor blade nails, could make a soldier stronger and more equipped for battle. But there is always the risk that these new enhanced soldiers will use their alterations outside required military operations, even perhaps against their own government/military bodies. Molly exemplifies this potential anarchic individual who is extremely difficult to control due to her enhancements.

Military bodies are in fact already developing more technological tools to help give soldiers more strength in battle. One existing example of this is a wearable machine called the Lockheed Martin’s Human Universal Load Carrier (HULC). HULC consists of a pair of battery-powered titanium hydraulic legs that are attached to the soldier’s own. Once attached, this will give each soldier the ability to carry 90kg loads (the weight of a full-grown gorilla) at 10mph.[13] This effectively allows soldiers to carry round a lot more ammunition, which results in soldiers being able to stay out in battle for much longer – the exoskeleton’s battery life lasts up to 48 hours. One can already foresee the potential dangers of such a weapon if it ends up in the wrong hands. And yet there is already a similar type exoskeleton which is being manufactured for public use. The Cyberdyne Hybrid Assisted Limb (HAL) can amplify human strength by a factor of 10 for up to five hours and is aimed to give physical support to people or workers who might need to carry heavy loads.[14] Professor Hugh Herr of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Boston believes that new technological inventions such as these wearable machines are the logical evolution of past inventions which society now takes for granted; “In two decades’ time, I think it will be common to see people using exoskeletons to walk down the street. When the bicycle was first invented, it was so striking a lot of people wanted to try it. I think these inventions will be similar.”[15]

These technological advancements are already more attached to the human body than ever before. Each new invention will help enhance a specific task in life, and once that task is fulfilled by a specific technological apparatus, there need be advancement for consumerism to continue. Therefore technology will have to become better, smaller, even more attached to the human body as not to get in the way; eventually the only next-best-thing remaining will be to merge the technology with the organic and realise Baudrillard’s prediction. Cyborgs are already present in the modern world in extreme circumstances such as amputee patients, but it can only be a matter of time until this reality becomes a matter of personal choice, the latest fashion statement.

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[1]Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation (Michigan: University of Michigan Press, 1994), 75.
[2]Ibid.
[3]Donna Haraway, “A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Social-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century,” in Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (New York: Routeledge, 1991), 150.
[4]David Bell, Cyberculture Theorists: Manuel Castells and Donna Haraway (London and New York: Routledge, 2008), 100-101.
[5]Haraway, “A Cyborg Manifesto”, 149.
[6]Claire Sponsler, “Cyberpunk and the Dilemmas of the Postmodern Narrative: The Example of William Gibson,” Contemporary Literature 33, no. 4 (1992): 631, http://www.jstor.org/stable/1208645.
[7]As explained in William Gibson Sprawl Trilogy Glossary http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sprawl_trilogy
[8]Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, 75.
[9]Victor Margolin, “Politics of the Artificial,” Leonardo 28, no. 5 (1995): 350, http://www.jstor.org/stable/1576217.
[10]William Gibson, Neuromancer (London: HarperCollins Voyager, 1995), 36.
[11]Ibid., 37.
[12]Haraway, “A Cyborg Manifesto”, 151.
[13]Ed Chipperfield, “Superhuman”, BBC Focus, Issue 215, May 2010, 32.
[14]Ibid., 33.
[15]Ibid.