TVII. Subject, Object, Abject

All technology is the prosthetic elaboration of agency. And this is the reason that it can be so difficult to tell, from moment to moment, just what will properly count as technology in the first place in the discussion of it.

We are all of us keenly aware of the habit technologies have of vanishing from our notice from everyday use, of vanishing into our bodies even, like languages or contact lenses do, like our telephones and keyboards and other network interfaces are beginning to do.

We so rapidly and thoroughly “naturalize” our many artifacts that the technological becomes instead a phrase with which to conjure up far more fantastic objects: devices which threaten to displace our livelihoods or which promise to deliver us lives of leisure, weapons that threaten to devastate the planet or techniques that promise to stave off environmental crises. “Technology” becomes especially the register of instruments that resonate with the fears and fantasies of agency, with helplessness and with omnipotence, reductios of the agentic in formation and under threat but never really quite present to hand. And in the figure of the cyborg, the unpredictable intercourse of intentions and tools and the worries and promises occasioned by their interminable collisions come to a kind of crisis.

“By the late twentieth century, our time [sic], a mythic time, we are all chimeras, theorized and fabricated hybrids of machine and organism; in short, we are cyborgs.” So writes Donna Haraway in the introduction to her profoundly influential “Cyborg Manifesto,” first published in 1985. The cyborg is a cybernetic organism, a functional creature that integrates biological organism with artificial machine. Haraway’s manifesto delineates a wide range of social and cultural registers in which the cyborg as figure and as lived reality makes its play in the world. “Contemporary science fiction is full of cyborgs, creatures simultaneously animal and machine, who populate worlds ambiguously natural and crafted,” she writes. “Modern medicine is also full of cyborgs, of couplings between organism and machine…. And modern war is a cyborg orgy, coded by C3I, command-control-communication-intelligence, an $84 billion item in 1984’s US defense budget.” Of course, in the years since the initial publication of Haraway’s piece medical prostheses and multimedia interfaces have proliferated deliriously, biological processes of reproduction and perception are now routinely technologically-assisted, cyborgic imagery suffuses ever more inescapably both our entertainments and our advertising (and don’t inquire too deeply into that distinction!), while unprecedented flows of capital, both monetary and emotional, have come to be invested in these fraught collisions and combinations of the organic with the machinic.

These are potent collisions, and they make for potent confusions. If the subject construed as one who is an “end in herself” is most intelligible in contrast to the objects – construed as “means to the subject’s ends” – against which she is persistently distinguished, and the instrumental use of which constitutes the definitive performance and experience of that subject qua subject, then what can it mean to that subject to find objects invading her proper precinct? What does it mean to the subject so construed to discern that objects constitute not just the furniture on a stage on which she acts as subject, but attach themselves inextricably to her? And, indeed, what is this subject to make of the possibly appalled discovery that the incorporation of and dependency upon these objects does not just superficially facilitate the definitive instrumental acts through which she knows herself as subject and best enjoys her subjecthood but in fact constitute the condition for the possibility of such action in the first place?

Haraway’s cyborg, in its impurity, permeability, and permanent corporeal confusion is another repudiation of Barker’s figure of the private subject, in Haraway’s terms that “ultimate self untied at last from all dependency, a man in space.” But despite (in fact, because of) its “partiality, irony, intimacy, and perversity,” its apparent privations, the cyborg is nonetheless a profoundly agentic figure in Haraway’s accounting, “oppositional, utopian… and hungry for connection.” If it seems paradoxical that Haraway would locate agency at such a fragmented, dependent, impure, and compromised site, this may be because we have grown accustomed to more sovereign figurations of agency.

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