Cyborgs

I just finished Deus Ex Machina: Human Revolution, a video game set in a dystopian future where some people are augmented with cybernetic devices.  One of the highlights of the game (which I loved) was the tension between "augs" and "pure" humans.  At the lowest level of society are people who cannot afford augs, while slightly above them are people who can afford rather second-rate augmentation by paying installments (pay day lenders, anyone?).  These augs are very obvious, prostheses made of medal and wire.  Soldiers fall somewhere in the middle with access to the most cutting edge technology yet being the most easily marked as augmented.  Some affluent people choose augs to enhance social skills while maintaining a pure human look.  The richest people (for the most part) remain unaugmented, unless they were involved in some trauma and lost a limb or an eye.  All of this takes the pulse of our current societies uneasy relationship with technology as impacted by a number of factors, including class.  Who has access to the latest technologies?

In a twist of confluence, I began re-watching Battlestar Galactica before picking up Deus Ex.  In this television show from the mid 2000s, cylons, a hybrid of human and machine, engage in a war of mutual destruction with their creators, human kind.  The tricky thing about some cylons is that they look human.  They even bleed.  One of the central questions about the show (and the game, for that matter) is "what does it mean to be human?"  At what point does technology obscure or even obliterate humanity?

Given all of these pop references, cyborgs have been weighing heavily on my mind.  In 1985, Donna Haraway wrote The Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late 20th Century.  In this piece, she embraces the metaphor of the cyborg, its hybrid nature allowing it to exist in the interstitial spaces between seemingly mutually exclusive theoretical camps.  She writes, "By the late 20th century, our time, a mythic time, we are all chimeras, theorized, and fabricated hybrids of machine and organism; in short, we are cyborgs" (118).  The ambiguous cyborg is the result of the dialectical process, synthesis of thesis and antithesis.  Is it possible that technology could amplify humanity?

Feminist theory and fantastic sci-fi promise a future where we will have to answer these questions.  Pondering, I came across a photo essay on the Brooke Army Medical Center.  What they are doing there for wounded veterans is nothing short of amazing.  It was difficult for me to discern the difference between the prostheses of soldiers and the imagined augmentations of Deus Ex.  We're out of time; we have to start answering these questions now.  Ambiguity, technology, hybridity, humanity - where do we go from here?