In the past two decades, technology have dramatically complicated the continuing examination and consideration of who human beings are and many aspects of their selves. Indeed, given a kind of technologies never before existing that allow people to change their physical bodies, “what is the self? ” is a question that is ever more difficult to answer correctly. The scientist and cultural professional critic Donna Haraway has been one of the most vocal persons who argue in favour of using this ongoing, deepening man-technology interfacing as the opportunity to think about an individual in extreme, but simultaneously, ethically responsible ways.
Her most famous piece is A Cyborg Manifesto in her Simians, Cyborgs and Women (1991). In it the author argues that in “the late twentieth century, our time, a mythic time, we are all chimeras, theorized and fabricated hybrids of machine and organism; in short, we are cyborgs” (Haraway 1991, p. 150). In declaring this, Haraway is bringing emphasis to the many ways that human lives and consciousnesses depend upon, and work in harmony at the same manner with, a variety of nonhuman things, including computers, transient visible images, artificial arms or legs and organs, and regulated living environments.
Donna Haraway’s work on cyborgs is an attempt to redirect the ways people imagine human-machine relations. In Haraway’s analysis, people are cyborgs, mixed origin of technology and humanity. Whether attached to human beings materially, like the heart pacemaker, or intellectually, like the television, people are machine and human. Once people understand perspective, images of moving objects or the net, the machine is in their minds even more than in their physical bodies. People cannot remove it, just as they cannot remove the technology governing their human bodies: the heart, lungs, liver, brain and other human organs.
Many of the debates regarding the superficiality and emptiness of contemporary culture rely on the dominance of technology over human race, the submission of thought to the empty abstraction of science where ideas are formulated by extracting common qualities from specific examples. But if people are cyborgs, the machine is no longer negative, of course no more or no less so than human beings (Gray 2001, p. 88). Haraway considers the existence of the two concepts, human and machine, but suggests that they are present and interweave in the same person, a cyborg.
Haraway’s argument refers specifically to technology but it also offers a subtle examination of all states of being twofold. Rather than the hierarchical relations of dual oppositions, Haraway presents a system of mutual dependent elements (Gunkel 2000, p. 67). The author reveals the irrelevance of nature-culture dual codes in the present age. For Haraway, the cyborg is a troubling boundary human form, not able to be reduced to either organism or machine, existing in between some of the most symbolic dual codes of modern ideas — human/machine, human/ animal, nature/technology (Gabilondo 1995, p.67).
In a multilayered formulation, the cyborg does not yield to either/or status, stepping over these dual oppositions by being neither/both. A further dual code built in some cyborg theory is also opposed: the dual code between science that is real and science fiction—the cyborg lives in both worlds at the same time. Haraway states that the cyborg is not merely a figure of fantasy, but a social reality belonging to the present age.