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Chapter Six The Hopeful Cyborg stephen฀garner The transhumanist vision is an end product of the belief that the human condition can be improved through reason, science, and technology. It focuses predominantly upon the autonomous individual, asserting the primacy of reason as a force for personal and therefore societal transformation. Through the use of applied reason, transhumanism asserts that values such as rational thinking, freedom, tolerance, and concern for others are increased, which ultimately leads to an ever-increasing improvement of the human condition.1 In this way transhumanism claims to offer the hope of a better world. And yet this proposed vision of a better world is often met with, if not outright hostility, then certainly significant anxiety. In part this anxiety is derived from the way in which transhumanism and other technologically optimistic narratives express their future trajectories through metaphors such as the cyborg. The technologies that transhumanists see converging— nanotechnology, biotechnology, and information technology—reshape and blur not just the traditional essence of what is considered natural but also the concepts used by individuals and communities to understand themselves and the world around them. For example, Jason Scott Robert and Françoise Baylis, who assess proposals to create mixed-species chimeras, argue that “the creation of novel beings that are part human and part nonhuman animal is sufficiently threatening to the social order that for many this is sufficient reason to prohibit any crossing of species boundaries involving human beings.”2 Understandably, this can lead to profoundly unsettling anticipation about the future. In contemporary Western technoculture one does not have to look very far to see the figure of the cyborg portrayed in popular culture and reflected upon in academia. Popular culture, through media such as film and television , portrays the cyborg figure as the literal fusion of the biological human being with technology, often to the detriment of human identity and dignity. In the academic world the cyborg represents a metaphor for exploring contemporary technoculture, existing as a hybrid figure forming a place where existing categories used to organize the world collapse and restructure 88฀ stephen฀garner themselves. In both cases the cyborg inhabits a newly constructed world that exists in the borderlands of more familiar cultural and experiential terrain. The cyborg is a generator of “narratives of apprehension” about technology and human technological proclivity. It stands in contrast to many of the traditional ways in which the world is ordered, a disconcerting form that raises questions about human nature, human identity, the relationship between the human and nonhuman in the world, and in particular, how to live wisely and wholesomely in a world constantly being reshaped by technology . As such, the cyborg encourages stories that capture both the anxiety engendered by the perceived negative effects of technology and a sense of wonder and awe at the power and scope of human technological agency.3 This is particularly true of questions that are concerned with the very essence of human personhood, about human nature, and the character of the relationship between human beings and the natural world. In commenting on public resistance and antipathy toward particular forms of biotechnology in Britain and Europe at the end of the 1990s, Celia Deane-Drummond and her colleagues write, “It seems conceivable that the intensity of current controversies around genetically modified crops and foods arises in part from the fact that, in their regulation in the public domain, conflicting ontologies of the person are making themselves felt in the politics of everyday life” (emphasis added).4 Ultimately, the questions raised concern not only different ways people describe being human and challenges to a perceived natural order but also how to live wisely and well in a technological world, and especially how to live hopefully. Cyborgs and Technology as Environment The term “cyborg” (or “cybernetic organism”), which was coined by Manfred Clynes and Nathan Kline in the 1960s, was part of a proposal to use technology to augment human beings (e.g., astronauts) to survive in harsh environments.5 The biological cyborg describes an organism, typically human, that has had technological artifacts added to its physical being. Some technological implants—such as synthetic hip replacements, pacemakers , and heart valves—are now taken almost for granted, as are a variety of reproductive technologies. Other technologies, such as prosthetics, continue to advance, along with medical and biotechnologies such as gene therapy, digital implants, cloning, transgenics, xenotransplantation, and pharmaceutical developments. However, this biological interpretation of the cyborg has less impact than understanding it...

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