“A cyborg is a cybernetic organism, a hybrid of machine and organism, a creature of social reality as well as a creature of fiction…” –Donna Haraway (1991)

I have never been very attracted to video games. The last video game that I played for any period of time was Super Mario, and as far as I can recall, I never beat the game. So I surprised myself (and many other people in my life) when I recently invested in a Nintendo Wii. I picked out games and began playing. This has had an effect that I never considered before; I began to dream in video games. My video game dreams are not extreme, but I will notice in those first sinking moments of sleep, when the mind has full reign, stairs and tunnels stretching below me. There will be a faint metallic taste to the dream as I jump and fight. Movements will have to be tried repeatedly as I navigate the control of my dream character on an oddly blocky dreamscape. This is an intimate reminder that I am a cyborg.

This column is titled “Cyborg Sightings” and in it I intend to discuss the way that our virtual/digital/game based selves are intimate with our physical/real life/fleshy selves. But what does it mean to be a cyborg? What does it imply? The cyborg is often portrayed in popular culture as a half human have technology monster. The binding of flesh and machine: something that is neither here nor there, unfeeling and still alive. There is more that we (I will argue that, if you are reading this, you can start sighting yourself as a cyborg right now) as cyborgs are beyond people-machine-things. I will quote extensively here from Donna Haraway’s 1991 Cyborg Manifesto to help us orient to some of the implications of being/sighting/becoming cyborgs:

The cyborg is resolutely committed to partiality, irony, intimacy, and perversity. It is oppositional, utopian, and completely without innocents. No longer structured by the polarity of public and private, the cyborg defines a technological polis based partly on a revolution of social relations in the oikas, the household. Nature and culture are reworked; the one can no longer be the resource for appropriate action or incorporation by the other. The relationships for forming wholes from parts, including those of polarity and hierarchical domination, are at issue in the cyborg world. Unlike the hopes of Frankenstein’s monster, the cyborg does not expect its father to save it through a restoration of the garden; that is, through the fabrication of heterosexual mate, through its completion in a finished whole, a city and cosmos. The cyborg does not dream of community on the model the organic family. The cyborg would not recognize the Garden of Eden; it is not made of mud and cannot dream of returning to dust. Perhaps that is why I want to see if cyborgs can subvert the apocalypse of returning to nuclear dust in the manic compulsion to name the Enemy. Cyborgs are not reverent; they do not re-remember the cosmos. They are wary of holism, but needy for connection—they seem to have a natural feel for united front politics, but without the vanguard party. The main trouble with cyborgs, of course is that they are the illegitimate offspring of militarism and patriarchal capitalism, not to mention state socialism. But illegitimate offspring are often exceedingly unfaithful to their origins. Their fathers, after all, are inessential.

So sayeth Haraway

The tasks of the cyborg are great, but they are those things that come with the inter-dimensional territory we travel. We surf the web and speak to people thousands of miles away as if they were next door. We speak with machines everyday, and we would be (temporarily, like the sudden loss of a limb) be disabled if they disappeared. Haraway points out that the cyborg cannot avoid questioning some of the strict definitions that held us in generations before our birth (we can argue that cyborgs and humans have never been separate, since the stick to dig grubs and the wheel to move blocks… but for our purposes let’s claim our birthdays as the day we found technology was part of what it meant to be…well…us) and we just can stop moving in between rules. We can’t stop downloading, hacking, chatting, texting, blogging, organizing, and working out new ways to use our cyborg multi-brains.

But let’s bring it into our real-lives. Technology is almost invisible, but in partnership with technology we define ourselves daily. Looking around my living room I can witness the above mentioned Wii, the many Wii-motes, remotes for my T.V., a DVD player, an air conditioner, a cell phone, a digital camera, and an ionic air purifier. Daily I see these items, I use them, I breath with them, and I rely on them to fulfill desires. We (me and my countless techno-appendages) can explore worlds that neither of us could alone. We can photograph a tree changing through the seasons, make it into a movie, and play this for a friend in Arizona who is without seasons. These tools and I move time and space.

But to really take full advantage of our cyborg natures, the promises they hold, we need to examine them. We need to name the ways we become in this space in order to stay conscious of the power we have, the actions we could take. The cyborg is without innocents says Haraway; there is bias, and there is danger. This does not mean that we must shake free of our cyborg parts (as if we could!) but it does mean that we should operate on many levels of awareness as we enter into conversation with the machine. This column will strive to do that, and I always invite readers to send it, ponder, wonder at, and play with the way we embrace cyborg selves. For now though, I’ll go back to exploring my own cyber self (all those frustrating bits included) and try and finish the next level in Super Mario Paper.