In her essay "A Cyborg Manifesto" Donna Haraway gives a detailed definition of the
cyborg as cybernetic organism made of flesh and technology.
The cyborg, more than any other concept, manifestly reveals one of the most striking discoveries in the recent scholarship in the philosophy:
not only God is dead but also Nature.
Indeed what can be defined as "natural" these days?
Neither gender nor race, neither family nor reproduction.
Thanks to new technologies (microelectronics, biotechnology, genetic engineering) almost anything can be discussed using the semantics of the cyborg, as everything, humans and objects, can be conceptualized in terms of assembly and disassembly. Any part can be connected with any other one according to common codes elaborated by Language and Technology.
"Biological organisms have become biotic systems, communications devices like others"
In her attempt to build "an ironic political mith faithful to feminism, socialism and materialism" Donna Haraway develops a complex network of thoughts (a sort of rhyzome ), all related, in a way or another, to the "cyborg" concept.
The cyborg concept allows Haraways :
- to find a perfect subject for her feminist theory of objectivity based on the situated, partial and embodied knowledge (the cyborg has a deconstructed identity, escaping the classical distinction between man and woman)
- to go over post-modernist theories that see technology only as a powerful mechanism of control (the cyborg represents a positive vision of the relationship between man and technology
- to re-think the unity of the human being thanks to the cyborg virtuality of a body that is a mix of organism/technology and can be seen as a "material-semiotic generative node" because it is a sort of platform for multiple codes of information from genetics to computer science.
A number of striking correspondences clearly illustrate the ways in which the Mexican painter Frida Kahlo (1907-1954) is an example of the cybernetic icon.
HARAWAY's CYBORG |
FRIDA | |
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a cyborg is a cybernetic organism, a hybrid of machine and organism, a creature of social reality as well as a creature of fiction |
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After the bus accident that "marked" her with a handrail which went through her body from one side to the other at the level of the pelvis, Frida has often represented her body as a mix of flesh and objects (see "The broken column" where her opened body allows us to see the inside: the spinal column is substituted by a broken ionic column). |
Cyborg replication is uncoupled from organic reproduction, |
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Frida was never able to have children. Abortion and the sufferings created by this event are one of her recurrent topics |
My cyborg myth is about transgressed boundaries, potent fusions, and dangerous possibilities ..., |
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In many of Frida's works the boundaries of the body are completely distorted, revealing |
The cyborg is resolutely committed to partiality, irony, intimacy, and perversity, |
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partiality: I have formulated the hypothesis that Frida was moved to represent herself and her body with a deeply fetishistic attitude. According to Mario Perniola's definition, fetishism "does not adore the world, does not have any illusions about it, nevertheless declares itself without reserve and with the greatest energy in favour of a part, of a detail..."; indeed, Frida made fetishes of several details of her body, through a real disintegration of her self/body scattered in her paintings and drawings |
The cyborg is a condensed image of both imagination and material reality, ... |
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Many of Frida's paintings show the combination of real and fantastic elements, like Diego's portraits with a third eye; self-portraits with Diego's image or a death image on the forehead ("Diego and I", "Diego in my thoughts", "Thinking about death"); |