Abstract
Although the cyborg’s use as both a cultural icon and academic term is very much a contemporary phenomenon, it is important to bear in mind that it did not emerge fully fledged out of nowhere but is the culmination of a particular mode of inquiry, one that has its roots deep in mythic history. The purpose of this chapter is to provide a historical context for the cyborg so as to better understand how the ideas contained within this metaphorical figure have developed. Despite Haraway’s contention that ‘the cyborg has no origin story’,1 its antecedents can be traced back to some of the earliest stories of human civilisation. Indeed, in order to understand the philosophical, aesthetic and economic factors that have contributed to the cyborg’s development one would have to begin from ancient mythology and trace a detailed history from there to the present day, incorporating the diverse fields of art, literature and science along the way. Such a wide-ranging survey is outside the scope of this book however, so the cyborg’s history is limited, in this instance, to a brief summary of relevant factors that have contributed to the cyborg’s theoretical significance.
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Notes
Patricia Warrick provides a useful summary of proto SF influences in ancient Greek mythology in her book The Cybernetic Imagination (Cambridge: Massachussetts Press, 1980).
References to cyborg-related legends such as the Golem, as well as to actual automata, can be found in Bruce Mazlish’s The Fourth Discontinuity: The Co-Evolution of Humans and Machines (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993).
See also Harry M. Geduld’s chapter ‘Genesis II: The Evolution of Synthetic Man’, Robots, Robots, Robots, ed. Harry M. Geduld and Ronald Goltesman (Boston: NY Graphic Society, 1978), which also provides an excellent survey of real-life automata appearing throughout history; while the first chapter of Reinventing Man: The Robot Becomes Reality, ed. Igor Aleksander and Piers Burnett (London: Kogan Page, 1983) provides the robot with an ancestry going back to antiquity.
William Gibson in interview with Larry McCaffery in Storming the Reality Studio: A Casebook of Cyberpunk and Postmodern Fiction, ed. Larry McCaffery (London: Duke University Press, 1991), p. 270.
Timo Siivonen, ‘Cyborgs and Generic Oxymorons: The Body and Technology in William Gibson’s Cyberspace Trilogy’, Science Fiction Studies, vol. 23, no. 69 (1996), p. 241.
Anne Balsamo, Technologies of the Gendered Body: Reading Cyborg Women (London: Duke University Press, 1996), p. 161.
Veronica Hollinger, ‘The Technobody and it Discontents’, Science Fiction Studies, vol. 24 (1997), pp. 126–7.
Geoff Simons, Robots: The Quest for Living Machines (London: Cassell, 1994), pp. 45–50.
Judith Halberstam, Skin Shows: Gothic Honor and the Technology of Monsters (Durham: Duke University Press, 1995), p. 38.
Franco Moretti, Signs Taken for Wonders: Essays in the Sociology of Literary Forms, trans. Susan Fischer (London: Verso, 1983), p. 86, cited by Halberstam, Skin Shows, p. 30.
Debbie Shaw argues that Shelley’s monster was a metaphor of the nineteenth-century woman writer, who she claims was deemed monstrous in her time in her article ‘In her Own Image: The Constructed Female in Women’s Science Fiction’, Science as Culture, vol. 3, no. 15, pt. 2 (1992), p. 274. See also Mary A. Favret’s article ‘A Woman Writes the Fiction of Science: The Body in FrankensteinGenders, no. 14 (1992), pp. 50–65.
Stelarc, ‘From Psycho-Body to Cyber Systems: Images as Posthuman Entities’, Virtual Futures: Cybererotics, Technology and Post-Human Pragmatism, ed. Joan Broadhurst Dixon and Eric J. Cassidy (London: Routledge, 1998), p. 117.
Linda Schiebinger, Taxonomy for Human Beings’, The Gendered Cyborg: A Reader, ed. Gill Kirkup, Linda Janes, Kathryn Woodward and Fiona Hovenden (London: Routledge, 1999).
T.H. Huxley, quoted by James Paradis in T.H. Huxley: Man’s Place in Nature (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1978), p. 136.
Pavlov, quoted by B.P. Babkin, Pavlov: A Biography (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1949), p. 65 - as cited in The Fourth Discontinuity, p. 124.
Michel Foucault, History of Sexuality, vol. 1 (New York: Pantheon Books, 1978), p. 140.
N. Katherine Hayles, How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics (Illinois: University of Chicago Press, 1999), p. 7.
David M. Rorvik, As Man Becomes Machine: The Evolution of the Cyborg (London: Sphere Books, 1979), p. 15.
Published in Processed Lives: Gender and Technology in Everyday Life, ed. Jennifer Terry and Melodie Calvert (London: Routledge, 1997).
For an explanation of this incident, see Chris Hables Gray’s Cyborg Citizen (pp. 136–7) and for a broader account of its circumstances and implications, see Julian Dibbell’s My Tiny Life: Crime and Passion in a Virtual World (London: Fourth Estate, 1999).
Allucquere Roseanne Stone ‘Will the Real Body Please Stand Up?’, Cybersexualities, ed. Jenny Wolmark (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1999), p. 91.
Sean French, The Terminator (BFI Modern Classics series, London: BFI Publishing, 1996), p. 39.
Alison Adam, Artificial Knowing: Gender and the Thinking Machine (London: Routledge, 1998), p. 28.
Claudia Springer, Electronic Eros: Bodies and Desire in the Post-Industrial Age (London: Athlone Press, 1996), p. 17.
Pam Rosenthal, ‘Jacked In: Fordism, Cyberpunk, Marxism’, Socialist Review, vol. 21, pt. 1 (1991), pp. 79–103.
See Shulamith Firestone’s The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution (London: The Women’s Press, 1979).
Patronico Schweickart, ‘What If: Science and Technology in Feminist Utopia’, Machina Ex Dea, ed. Jean Rotschild (New York: Pergamon, 1983), p. 201.
Judith Halberstam, ‘Automating Gender: Postmodern Feminism in the Age of the Intelligent Machine’, Feminist Studies, vol. 17, no. 3 (Fall 1991), p. 446.
Forest Pyle, ‘Making Cyborgs, Making Humans: Of Terminators and Blade Runners’, Film Theory Goes to the Movies, ed. Jim Collins et al. (London: Routledge, 1993), p. 241.
David Burner, Making Peace with the 60s (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1996), p. 223.
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© 2005 Sue Short
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Short, S. (2005). Body and Soul: A History of Cyborg Theory. In: Cyborg Cinema and Contemporary Subjectivity. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230513501_3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230513501_3
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