Cyborg Anthropology

Background

In anticipation of Foucault’s fears, scientists are on the verge of creating an artificial being that will imitate man’s appearance, engagement, behaviour, and actions. Two possibilities of enhancement are being developed today. One was already described – integrating man with the machine, making him almost artificial through identification of his behaviour and computer program. On the other hand, we have artificial beings which are almost human and which mimic the features and the appearance of man, but which are not human but non-human. This second possibility will be described in the following chapters.

George Grant expresses his attitude towards man’s dependence on technology. He adopts Nietzsche’s ideas from the Will to Power, according to which the new world originated from a pure will for technology, which is in reality an abstract and demonic will for accumulation and disintegration, as a dynamic essence of the modern society. According to Nietzsche, through development of will, the very technique as the core of the modern age, “the horizon had finally been wiped clean” (Kroker, 1985, p. 27). Nietzsche knew that “a new and intensified version of technical domination was being prepared for the inhabitants of the empire of technology was being prepared for the inhabitants of the empire of technology. He also recognized, tragically so, that with the coming-to-be of the society of the pure drive to technique, there could be no turning back to the recovery, however urgent, of the “inner restraints” of western culture” (Kroker, 1985, p. 27). In this world, human beings “were reduced to the “commandments” of the will to technique” (Kroker, 1985, p. 28). The tragedy of the new world lies in the fact that we will be forced to live within the purview of the technological society as one of its means. With respect to this, Grant argues: “We can hold in our minds the enormous benefits of technological society, but we cannot so easily hold the ways it may have deprived us, because technique is ourselves” (Kroker, 1985, p. 28). His analysis reveals the meaningless vision of life within the modern technological society: “All descriptions or definitions of technique which place it outside ourselves hide from us what it is” (Kroker, 1985, p. 28).

According to McLuhan, “Media, by altering the environment, evoke in us unique ratios of sense perceptions. The extension of any one sense alters the way we think and act - the way we perceive the world. When these ratios change, MEN CHANGE” (McLuhan 1969 qtd. in Kroker, 1985, p. 56) In contrast to “Grant’s haunting image of trapped beings, ‘half-flesh/half-metal’, McLuhan speaks, of a ‘cosmic man’ caught up in a more cosmopolitan and Darwinian struggle among competing media of communication which gain primacy as extensions of the ‘social and psychic faculties’” (Kroker, 1985, p. 53). In the age of scientific humanism as naturalism, we become human beings living inside the mediated environment of the technostructure whose content is “a red herring distracting our attention from the essential secret of technology as the medium, or environment, within which human experience is programmed” (Kroker, 1985, p. 56). In this view, technology is “an ‘extension’ of biology: the expansion of the electronic media as the ‘metaphor’ or ‘environment’ of twentieth-century experience implies that, for the first time, the central nervous system itself has been exteriorized” (Kroker, 1985, p. 57). This way,