A Cyborg’s Work Is Never Done: Programming Cyborgs, Workaholics, and Feminists in Marge Piercy’s He, She, and It

Abstract

In his utopian account of what he alternately calls “Eupsychian” or “Enlightened” management, Abraham Maslow explains, “We can learn from self-actualizing people what the ideal attitude toward work might be under the most favorable circumstances. These highly evolved individuals assimilate their work into the identity[,] into the self, i.e., work actually becomes part of the self[,] part of the individual’s definition of himself.”¹ As he develops this argument, he surreally casts work as a new human organ:

In self-actualizing people, the work they do might better be called “mission,” “calling,” “duty,” “vocation,” in the priest’s sense. This mission in life is actually so identified with the self that it becomes as much a part of the worker as his liver or lungs. For the truly fortunate worker, the ideally enlightened worker, to take away work (mission in life) would be almost equivalent to killing him.²

In its characterization of self-actualizing workers as dependent on their labor for spiritual and physical survival, Maslow’s metaphor invites comparison with several others that describe contemporary workers in the West. This chapter will examine three of these—the “cyborg,” the “workaholic,” and the “feminist”—as embodiments of the principles of self-actualization Maslow introduced to the arena of management in the 1960s.