CYBORG DREAMS: Form Follows Function
John Miller“Cyborg” is a neologism, short for cybernetic organism. Curiously, this grafting together ofwords recalls Dada collage, which, however dated, provides an enduring iconography of thecyborg as an index of shock. The collage form itself enacts the violence to which Dada –Berlin Dada especially – responded: that of the first, fully mechanized war. Because acombination of telephone, telegraph, radio and aviation made possible World War I’s
unprecedented scale and intensity, many blamed technology for the carnage. Even afterward,
the proliferation of prosthetic limbs – a consequence of land mines – became a stubborn
reminder of the war. Dada thematized this, confronting its audience with the prospect ofcyborgs long before anyone called them that. Although Dada ostensibly privileged non-sense,
its depictions of human/machine hybrids, in works such as Georg Grosz’s “RepublikanischeAutomaten” (1920), Raoul Haussmann’s “Dada Messe” (1920) or John Heartfield’s“Conquest of the Machines” (1934), were meant as moral allegories. In all, the integration of
the machine into the human body ultimately stood for evil.
Besides recalling death and destruction, widespread amputation also introduced the masses tothe “phantom limb” phenomenon. Typically, this is understood as a sense of still having a
missing arm or leg, but it applies to prosthetic extensions – whether worn or not – as well. It
entails either a psychic remapping of the body or a lag in that remapping that is, by definition,
uncanny. This Unheimlichkeit is the flipside of Dadaist allegory, perhaps because altering
where the body begins and leaves off holds such radical implications for individualsubjectivity. Gregory Bateson considers this, using a more traditional, yet more dramatic
example:Suppose I am a blind man, and I use a stick. I go tap, tap, tap. Where do I start? Is
my mental system bounded by the handle of the stick? Is it bounded by my skin?
Does it start halfway up the stick? Does it start at the top of the stick?1
Although the liminal body has always been subject to some negotiation, the phantom limb
began to destabilize popular, common sense understandings of corporeal definition, especiallyvis-à-vis an emergent electronic technology.
The Second World War and the Cold War both continued to push technological innovation
forward. In the Space Race especially, technicians began to see the body more as a potential
variable than as a insurmountable constant. Manfred Clynes coined the term “cyborg” in1960 while working at the Dynamic Simulation Lab in New York’s Rockland State Hospitalwith Nathan Kline. In tandem with their research, the two published “Cyborgs and Space” inthe journal Astronautics. (Kline, in fact, joked that the new word sounded “like a town inDenmark.”)2 They matter-of-factly proposed that instead of creating an elaborate, artificial
environment within a space capsule, it would be more cost-effective to chemically adapt
astronauts to less comfortable conditions through homeostatic injections of drugs. The idea ofa self-regulating system, modelled on human metabolism, was central to their conception ofwhat a cyborg could be. As opposed to most Dada – then sci-fi – depictions, they considered
1Gregory Bateson, Steps Toward an Ecology of the Mind (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), p. 465,
quoted by William J. Mitchell, Me++: the Cyborg Self and the Networked City (Cambridge: the MIT Press,2003), p. 35.
2Manfred E. Klynes and Nathan S. Kline, “Cyborgs and Space,” The Cyborg Handbook, ed. Chis Hables Gray
(New York: Routledge, 1995), pp. 29-33.

the cyborg to be more a systemic entity than a discrete thing per se. Cybernetics itself
concerns the control of information systems. Norbert Weiner had initiated this field of
inquiry in 1946. He wanted to produce an artificial control mechanism modelled on thehuman mind, which, relying on positive and negative feedback, could respond to the world
around it. He proposed that a “thinking machine” could be built using servomechanisms.
This goal binds cybernetics to the aims of artificial intelligence.3
Artificial intelligence implies transcending the mind/body split. Early in the 17th century,
Renè Descartes postulated the “clockwork paradigm”: the possibility of reducing animal
bodies to their mechanical function. This notion forms a curious counterpart to thephilosopher’s oft-repeated dictum, “I think, therefore I am.” The dialectic between these twoideas informs the fantasy of building a thinking machine, a desire that hearkens back to the16th century when inventors and tinkerers began to produce androids, i.e., automatons withhuman faces, that could play musical instruments, write and speak. These served mostly as
amusements for the nobility. The overriding impulse was to make a machine appear as
lifelike as possible. One of the best known was Baron Wolfgang von Kempelen’s Great Chess
Automaton. The machine took the form of a man in Turkish garb, and it usually won its
matches, even against such illustrious opponents as Benjamin Franklin. People suspected thatthe contraption was a hoax, operated by a dwarf concealed inside. In fact, as von Kempelen
finally confessed, it was not a dwarf at all but two fully grown chess masters.4 Lest all of thisseem quaintly irrelevant, recall the drama that once surrounded competitions between chesschampions and computers. Until recently, the computers usually lost. Then, in February
1996, Gary Kasparov played IBM’s Deep Blue, a state-of-the-art supercomputer. AlthoughKasparov won handily the first time, the following year IBM doubled Deep Blue’s databaseand processing power.5 After the machine trounced Kasparov, he declared it “played likeGod.”6 Chillingly, this not only suggests that thought is reducible to a mechanical operation,
but also that perfect calculability is god-like. It was in this vein that Walter Benjaminreferenced von Kempelen’s automaton as an allegory of historical determinism in his “Theseson the Philosophy of History.” With automatons, if, on one hand, the fantasy of creating life
spawned technological innovation, on the other, living came to be equated with the ability toperform a discrete function.
Although Andy Warhol is not typically associated with cyborgs, his declaration “I want to bea machine” invites such a comparison. Seen against Abstract Expressionist gesturalism,“being a machine” signalled the photo-mechanical displacement of the artist’s hand in theartwork. It implies a sweeping social shift as well. Although initially regarded as a form of
neo-Dada, Pop embraced – not rejected – the machine as a kind of liberation from humanistideology. More specifically with regard to cyborgs, Dan Graham cites Warhol’s quip as aparaphrase of The Creation of the Humanoids – purportedly one of Warhol’s favourite
movies. It follows a staple science fiction plot: more rational and efficient androids take overhuman civilization from their less dependable creators. Graham further notes that the film’s
stiff acting style forces identification with the androids.7 For Warhol, the idea of converting
oneself into a machine guarantees that the individual will function as a perfect productive
apparatus, impervious to irrational emotions. Thus, the Warholian machine equates
3Bruce Grenville, “The Uncanny: Experiments in Cyborg Culture,” The Uncanny: Experiments in Cyborg
Culture, ed. Bruce Grenville (Vancouver: Vancouver Art Gallery and Arsenal Pulp Press, 2001) p. 27.
4
Online, “The Great Chess Automaton,” http://www.museumofhoaxes.com/chess_auto.html.
5
Online, “Man versus Machine,” http://whyfiles.org/040chess/main2.html.
6
Online, “Deep Blue Wins Match, ” http://www.research.ibm.com/deepblue/home/may11/story_1.html.
7Dan Graham, “Cinema, Theater, Power,” Rock My Religion (Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press,1993).

performance, not subjectivity, with genuine existence – or, simply with existence, genuine ornot. The system it invokes is political economy. Accordingly, his studio becomes The
Factory. Curiously, his philosophy is the exact obverse of Descartes’: “I produce, therefore I
am.” Moreover, its subtle undermining of traditionally gendered subject positions anticipates
Donna Haraway’s more explicit Cyborg Manifesto. Yet, the figure of the machine as a quasiautistic entity tempers the futuristic aspect of Warhol’s stance, especially given cybernetics’emphasis on the communicative interface. Ultimately, it is the camera, not the robot, whichautomates Warhol’s oeuvre. His paintings, for example, are predominantly photo-silkscreens.
Their gridded images of Marilyn Monroe or Elizabeth Taylor suggest that not only are thestars produced and reproduced, but also that they essentially may be replicants. Warhol’sfilms, especially the screen tests, are as much about the camera as they are the actors.
Particularly suggestive with regard to Warhol’s work, Villem Flusser’s treatise, Towards a
Philosophy of Photography, casts the camera as a means of social roboticization. Here,photography constitutes a system that serves as an apparatus: in Flusser’s words both “aplaything or a game that simulates thought” and “an organization or system that enables
something to function.” Thus, the camera is a device that programs its users. Flusser
distinguishes the camera from both tools and machines. A tool “tears” an object from thenatural world for human use. It simulates the body, yet remains a function of the human.
Thus, the tool is variable while the human remains constant. Machines are tools informed byscientific theory. As such, they are not limited to simulating the body. Nor are they afunction of the human. Instead, the human is variable and the machine becomes a constant.
According to Flusser, in sharp contrast to both tools and machines, photography is a systemthat not only surrounds the human but also incorporates it. Neither the photographic nor thehuman are constants. Rather, they are variables that dynamically respond to each other.
Although the camera is not a cybernetic device per se, the photographic universe is ahomeostatic system that, as “a combination game based on chance,” brackets out human
involvement except to enact the program.8 In this respect, one may conceive of the entire
photographic apparatus cybernetically, namely as a self-regulating system of information
management realized through a human, corporeal interface. As such, Flusser’s critiqueultimately revolves around the elimination of free will, a science fiction trope that has come tocharacterize the postmodern condition.
Probing the moral and social implications of cybernetics is one of the earmarks of Phillip K.
Dick’s science fiction. For example, the film Blade Runner, now canonized as a postmodern
classic, is based on Dick’s short story, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? It concerns abounty hunter whose job is to eliminate androids from “planet Earth.” After a fellow bounty
hunter turns out to be an android, he begins to wonder if he himself is human. The Minority
Report, another short story by Dick, focuses on the question of free will in cybernetics. The
protagonist, John Anderton, has initiated a system of Precrime in Washington, D.C. By
harnessing three clairvoyant individuals – Precogs – to a computer, Anderton and his police
unit can detect and thwart crimes before they happen. The system works so well that murderin the D.C. area plummets by 95%, but Precrime, of course, flies in the face of the judicial
principle, innocent until proven guilty. When the Precogs predict that Anderton himself willcommit murder, he breaks with his own system, hoping to save his life. He steals a copy ofthe report only to find that the Precogs’ predictions were not unanimous. One of the threefinds him innocent; that is the minority report. Further complicating matters is the fact thatknowledge of the reports can affect their outcome. This, after all, is the very premise ofPrecrime. Nonetheless, Anderton goes on to commit the murder as the majority predicted,
8Villem Flusser, Towards a Philosophy of Photography (London: Reaktion Books, 1983).

leaving the reader to wrestle with the premises of Precrime and – more broadly – automatedsociety.
Part of the pleasure afforded by Phillip K. Dick stories is that a typically childish premise
raises such unsettling questions about contemporary culture’s dependence on technology.
The premise demands that the reader suspend disbelief. The stories themselves are allegories
or parables. The childishness of the premise – in the case of The Minority Report, theclairvoyants – guarantees that. What The Minority Report examines is not so much an exact
cybernetic apparatus, but rather its effects. Precrime turns out to be a kind of homeostaticsystem and, like Flusser’s understanding of photography, it serves to robotize society. Its
determinist underpinnings do away with intentionality. For example, under Precrime, murder
and manslaughter become virtually indistinguishable. As with Descartes’ clockwork
paradigm, Precrime reduces humans to their behavioural function. This gives rise to a certain
fatalism; in its inevitability, the plot itself seems automated, despite the protagonist’s
struggles against the outcome.
Despite cybernetic advances in medicine, for the time being at least, the vast majority of theworld’s population does without artificial organs, artificial joints, pacemakers or even contactlenses. In other words, the physical integration of machinery and devices into the human bodyremains the exception rather than the rule. A totalizing, human-mechanical mutation has notcome to pass. After all, in Dada these were allegorical figures. Instead, a Warholian ethos of
artifice predominates. Rather than becoming cybernetic organisms, the masses have becomeorganisms embedded within overarching cybernetic apparatuses. In a sense, the individual
body is unbounded and spread over a neural communications web. Whether or not this makes
them cyborgs is largely a semantic point, even if, in the wake of Donna Haraway’s polemics,
a whole host of critics and theorists have been quick to lay claim to cyborg identities. Yet, as
William J. Mitchell maintains, it is networking – not hybridization – that automates a cyborg
to its maximum capacity. 9 A network can enable a cybernetic condition without having tophysically alter the bodies it subsumes. This makes it extremely efficient. Mitchell furtherargues, contra William Gibson, that virtual and material realms are not separate, but
superimposed.10 Thus, manipulating virtual information produces palpable, material results.
Nonetheless, Mitchell overlooks the coding that enables such a superimposition. Coding,moreover, is one of Flusser’s key concerns. For him, it is prerequisite to programming.
Through coding, the network can enact social programming. Thus, an examination of the
networked condition becomes especially important with regard to cybernetics.
Ever since 1850, when people began to use the term network for a spatial communication
system, they have imbued it with utopian aspirations. This holds true for the railroad, thetelegraph, the telephone, the Internet and other technologies as well. By allowing for new
kinds of exchange, the network is supposed to epitomize democracy. Yet, as Armand
Mattelart maintains, the network is both a symbol and a tool of economic and social relations
that ultimately serves the elite. He goes on to argue that an Internet-driven techno-utopia is
the ideological weapon of choice for global “free” marketeers, citing Bill Gates who heralded
a “network of networks” that would create the ultimate market for “frictionless capitalism.”
In contrast, Mattelart cites Adolphe Quentelet’s (1796-1874) ominous system of statisticalanalysis: “social physics.” Quentelet was the first to claim that one could measure andclassify the probability of an individual to commit crime by evaluating such factors as season,
9William J. Mitchell, “Connecting Creatures,” Me++: the Cyborg Self and the Networked City (Cambridge: theMIT Press, 2003), p. 19-39.
10Mitchell, “Prologue, ” p. 3.

sex, age, social class, nationality, geographical locale and so forth.1112 In this vein, even theotherwise buoyant William J. Mitchell, sees potential for such abuse with current information
technology:
Precrime does not require mutants floating in vats, as in The Minority Report – just adatabase, rules and profiles, inference engines, and data mining algorithms. And, if theconclusions they draw are not one hundred percent accurate, then that can always bedismissed as collateral damage – unfortunate, but justified by the end result.13
As harrowing as that prospect might seem, it lacks incentive, especially compared tofrictionless capital. The free market may be the perfect haven for the social cyborg, aphantasmagoria of demographics. In contrast, freedom may become the ability to slip under
the demographic radar. Finally, this growing informaticization of political economy helps put
into context one more of Warhol’s quips: “My mind is like a tape recorder with one button:erase” – a Dada device if there ever was one.

11

Armand Mattelart, “Mapping Modernity: Utopia and Communications Networks, ” Mappings, ed. Denis
Cosgrove, (London: Reaktion Books, 1999).
13Mitchell, “Logic Prisons,” p. 200.