And on emotional and conceptual levels, this threshold seems to have already been crossed; in the digital discourse robots are already recognized as humans. “The Humanoid Race” (Capps 2004) features nineteen different robots, with each receiving a personal representation (i.e., not as a type, but as a particular): each has a distinctive look and a distinctive name (such as Jerry and Asimo). But they are all—after all—robots; part of “the family of post-man,” to paraphrase the title of the famous 1950s MoMA exhibition (Steichen 2002).
To the degree that humans, and specifically in this case their bodies, are seen as technologies, they are also instrumentalized and commodified. They become things, objects that can be evaluated quantitatively (in terms of price and performance) and, in turn, be improved, enhanced, altered, and purchased. As instruments, human beings also become a means; a clear break from an Enlightenment humanist notion of humans as carrying substantive and unqualified worth as subjects and as ends in and of themselves.
One of the most theoretical articulations of this posthuman stance is put forth by Donna Haraway, whose thought is featured in “You Are Cyborg” (Kunzru 1997). Haraway’s basic thesis, according to the article, is that “the realities of modern life happen to include a relationship between people and technology so intimate that it’s no longer possible to tell where we end and machines begin.” She prefers, therefore, to speak of cyborgs rather than humans. For Haraway, the technologization of the body entails not only the physical internalization of technology into the body but also the “idea of the body as high-performance machine”—that is, the instrumentalization of the body.
Haraway sees no moral dilemma concerning the “cyborgization” of humans. Referring to the use of performance-enhancing drugs in sports, “Haraway could hardly see what the fuss was about. Drugs or no drugs, the training and technology make every Olympian a node in an international technoculture network just as ‘artificial’ as sprinter Ben Johnson at his steroid peak” (Kunzru 1997). Haraway refuses to differentiate culture (or nurture) from nature, since she refuses to see the body as natural in the first place. “Haraway’s world is one of tangled networks—part human, part machine; complex hybrids of meat and metal that relegate old-fashioned concepts like natural and artificial to the archives” (Kunzru 1997).
Not only is the cyborgization of humans untroubling, but also, for Haraway, this reconceptualization of humans as networks is liberating, particularly for women. The cyborg is a “symbol of feminist liberation, since it undercuts the naturalistic ideology that legitimizes women’s inferior social position. “Women for generations were told that they were ‘naturally’ weak, submissive, overemotional” and so forth. “If all these things are natural, they’re unchangeable . . . On the other hand, if women (and men) aren’t natural but are constructed, like a cyborg, then, given the right tools, we can all be reconstructed” (Kunzru 1997).
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