The cyborg as a pop-cultural figure emerged from the technological experiments of the Cold War directly into the waiting hands of an American public enchanted with New-Age mysticism. The term “cyborg” was coined in an article titled Cyborgs and Space written by Clynes and Kline (both were researchers at Rockland State University) who argued that it was possible to instantiate our own evolution “without alteration of heredity by suitable biochemical, physiological, and electronic modifications of man’s existing modus vivendi.” (Clynes & Kline, 1960, p. 26) The primary use of this evolutionary capacity for the authors was the creation of a humanity better suited for space travel. This was especially prescient given the Cold War and Space Race between the US and The Soviet Union. Within this drive for the scientific and evolutionary improvement of the human, however, we find not only the cultural anxieties of the Cold War, Nuclear Annihilation, and Capitalism vs. Communism, but a far more fundamental desire: that with the automation of certain human problems, humanity would be “free to explore, to create, to think, and to feel.” (Clynes & Kline, 1960, p. 27) It is this liberatory capacity of the cyborg that has captured the American imagination, and that I intend to discuss in this essay. I will investigate the socio-political and economic situation that has engendered the desire for liberation and a returnal of control to the general population, along with the figure of the cyborg itself and what capacities it may have as a tool for change. I will be drawing from the works of Federico Campagna, Erik Davis, Donna Harraway, and many others who will provide valuable insight to this investigation.
To begin, we must look at the broader cultural mindset of the New Age and the desire for finding new modes of understanding the world and one’s self that came along with New Age Mysticism. Emerging in the decades after the end of the second world war and the beginning of the Vietnam War, New Age thinking diverged and opposed the traditionalist and fascist cultural narratives that preceded it. At the same time as new ideas around globalization, world-peace, and social progress emerged, so too did notions of global spirituality and a focus on the individual as a subject for spiritual enlightenment. In the preceding decades, thinkers in Anthroposophy and Theosophy like Helena Blavatsky had undertaken syncretic projects that pushed for an understanding and following of a “true” global religion and worldview through the combining and reinterpreting religious texts and beliefs. Her book The Secret Doctrine (1888) aimed to offer its ideals as viable to the broader public and possibly something that could be institutionalized. We can find similar attempts at both the syncretization/generalization and commercialization of spiritual and religious practices nearly a century later and at the height of the New Age in Swami Satchidananda’s To Know Yourself: The Essential Teachings of Swami Satchidananda. Whose writing and spiritual beliefs became not only popular, but profitable in their promotion of idealized universalist views, utopianism, and the rhetorical style of what we would call “self-help” books today.
The impulse at the time towards universalism did not stop with religion, as scientists in the United States also began to take on the task of creating a universal theory of science and the use of physics and biology became popular tools for thinking through the world and the cosmos beyond. This came out of the anxieties of the Cold War and the national pride and security staked on “the Space Race” in the national consciousness. A nationwide investment in science, spirituality, and our place in the world spurred on itself onward through the quest to answer those fundamental questions of “why are we here?” “where did we come from?” and “do we matter?” These universalist mindsets coincided with a multitude of civil rights movements like 2nd wave and ecofeminism, LGBTQ+ rights, and the Black civil rights movement and antiracism. These social movements were not only the result of extremely hard work on the side of those oppressed and the increase in universalist mindsets, but also a preoccupation with the “self,” its relation to the world, and the creation of identity.
This preoccupation with the “self” is, perhaps unsurprisingly, symptomatic of the capitalist ideologies prevalent in the US and the instantiation of capitalist hegemony on a global scale in the latter half of the 20th century and into the 21st century today. Given the emergence of consumer culture and the proliferation of what Marx called “commodity fetishism” people were becoming increasingly disconnected from each other and community, it’s no wonder that spiritualism became a mechanism for connecting with others, finding community, and re-ordering the world in a comprehensible way. This reach for stability is reflected in modern spiritual movements today, especially with the introduction and proliferation of the internet as an easily accessible source of information and communication around the world. Spirituality is not the only stabilizing force reached for in uncertain times when people feel as if control of their lives has been wrested from them and there is no opportunity for legitimate reproach. These other forces include belief in conspiracy theories, sports, celebrity culture, and more. Ultimately, when the world around us seems to no longer be in our control or changeable by us, humanity copes through narrative. I do not say this to trivialize people’s closely held beliefs, nor to claim that this narrative impulse is a bad thing, in fact I think it allows us more power than we might think. Later in this essay, I will look at narrative as a tool more closely, and put it in conversation with the genre of science-fiction and the cyborg. For now, let us continue our investigation into the cultural moment of the new age and afterward, particularly turning our attention to how different thinkers have diagnosed these past 70 years or so.
First, let us look at Federico Campagna and his book Technic and Magic, wherein he outlines what he believes the state of our world to be, and what it could become. Technic and Magic is primarily concerned with two opposing cosmogonies of the world, or rather, two opposing metaphysical understandings of the world. The reality-system of “Technic” is the result of Campagna’s desire to discover “What defines at the core the peculiarity of our present time, as opposed, for example, to previous times populated by ghosts and gods?” (Campagna, 2018, p. 4) and describes the state of our world and the way we think about our own existence today. For him, this reality system is the foundation that allows for the economic, cultural, and political problems of our time. The primary problem with Technic is in its instrumentalization of everything within it. As Campagna describes it, Technic results in…
“The combined annihilation of things’ full and autonomous existence, and their total transformation into sets of equivalent serial units, is at the heart of the contemporary process of transfiguration of the world into an impalpable cloud of equivalent financial units, digital data, chains of information, items of identification.” (Campagna, 2018, p. 18)
Forsaking existence as an aspect of, well, existence for the focus on and domination of what Campagna calls “essence,” everything is reduced to its potentiality, and its ability to create more potentiality. What is important is no longer what someone or something is, but what it could be, whilst ensuring that it never becomes.
This framework of Technic is helpful for understanding the lived experience of the general population. It provides a foundation for understanding how Neoliberal Capitalism has become so hegemonic in our society today, and provides a different method of understanding Marx’s idea of alienation and how workers have become alienated from the products of their labor. An idea from Marx that seems fundamental to understanding Technic is “If then the product of labor is alienation, production itself must be active alienation, the alienation of activity, the activity of alienation.” (Marx, 1844, p. 74) As the sheer act of living with a metaphysical understanding of the world as Technic results in alienation, so there is no way of existing within Technic that allows freedom. The very act of being alive under Technic prevents one from living. Campagna discusses the ways in which things exist in the world of Technic through the way that language and grammar are used in that world as a blueprint. Language seen in this way is a facilitator of production and allows for the serialization of any unit, the ontology of the world becomes “no longer an ontology of ‘things’, but an ontology of ‘positions’.” (Campagna, 2018, p. 32) The existence of something is no longer important, only the position it could hold.
The final aspect of Technic to talk about is the idea of “Safety” as it relates to and results from Technic. This notion of Safety is the function of Technic that exists to placate the masses of people who quite rightly feel trapped in the world as it is, with no real recourse for escape. It is the process by which the possibilities of what one can become are ever-expanded, while at the same time being ever-postponed. In spite of the seemingly limitless possibilities. The consequences of this aspect of Technic is best described by Campagna himself:
“In a world that is supposed to lie in a state of embryonic coma, its living inhabitants strive for a way out of the desert of its suspended becoming. Sadly, for thousands of people every year, this way out materializes as suicide. Even worse, for millions of others, this same desire to escape paralysis takes the form of political support for environmentally catastrophic policies and for the development of apocalyptic nuclear arsenals… both of them reveal a desire for the annihilation of the ‘world’ – where a world is the product of a certain reality system. Both forms of suicidal tendency actually function as strategies of hope, pointing towards the need to move out of the present reality system and of the world that it has brought about.” (Campagna, 2018, p. 229)
This quote is the final nail in the coffin of our world, as Campagna diagnoses it. Humanity has created a reality-system hostile to itself, and this is the reason for the resurgence in a reaching for spiritualism, and a more universal spiritualism at that. People are looking for modes of reforming the connections that have been lost in the rise of Neoliberal capitalism. It is this metaphysics that Campagna poses his alternate reality-system, Magic, against. The goal of Magic is to pull those within its reality-system back into the “living, ineffable dimension of its existence.” (Campagna, 2018, p. 230) and back into the experience of existence itself, rather than the experience of the potentiality of existence. Additionally, in contrast to Technic’s Safety, Campagna describes this goal of Magic’s, the result of living in the metaphysics of it, as Salvation.
The Salvation that Magic wishes to bring is the capacity for people and things in the world to not only be, but to actually become as well. The stability granted by simply being, and having that being reinforced and celebrated by the metaphysics of our world, rather than negated by it, would allow people to be healed and healthy once again. This transition from Technic to Magic that Campagna proposes does not have to happen at the scale of society, nor the broader cultural mindset of our time. Rather, it needs only take place on an individual level in order to help someone, in order to provide them Salvation. Not Salvation on an ontological level, because, as Campagna notes, inherent to Magic’s reality-system is the idea that people already exist in a state of having been saved or of already being healthy. But Salvation on a personally perceivable level, so that the state of one’s self might be known and yet ineffable, so that the paradox at the foundation of Magic—the ineffability of the Self, might be known.
The uncertain nature of the current times is also discussed by Erik Davis in his book TechGnosis: Myth, Magic, and Mysticism in the Age of Information wherein he aims to demonstrate how, in spite of the narrative that technology has disenchanted the world, those supernatural, mythological, and spiritual impulses we associate with “the ancients” have stealthed their way into still lying at the foundations of our modern world. For Davis, like Campagna, the human self lies at the center of mystical thought. In contrast to Campagna’s diagnosis of the self under Technic, where one is pushed into stasis through the ever-present drive to achieve more potentiality, and it is all one can do to not stop existing entirely, Davis understands the self as constantly changing with the technology that we create—most especially communication and information technologies. He describes how, “By creating a new interface between the self, the other, and the world beyond, media technologies become part of the self, the other, and the world beyond. They form the building blocks, and even in some sense the foundation, for what we now increasingly think of as “the social construction of reality.” (Davis, 1999, p. 7) The social construction of reality, as Davis calls it, is what Campagna calls Technic. And it is media technologies that Campagna seems to refer to as “language and grammar” not in the literal sense, but in the ways in which they can be used to understand the serial ordering and presence of things in the world. Both understand and discuss the informatization of our culture, our world, and ourselves. Davis’s project, like Campagna, is to provide new methods of imagining and thinking about our world and our future. Unlike Campagna, Davis aims to do this not through presenting a new metaphysics like Magic, but by investigating how older metaphysical understandings of the world—which as he points out were primarily tied into religion—can be used to reveal truths about our current cultural moment and can provide methods for resisting the harm, both materialized and potential, that the metaphysics of our time threatens.
Vital to understanding “the psychological dynamics of technomysticism” (Davis, 1999, p. 9) are the “Spirit” and the “Soul.” Spirit might be seen as the aspect of the self that is impersonal and that is drawn to science—to clarity, and to truth. Soul, on the other hand, seems more likely to be drawn to magic, as it’s concerned with the imagination and powers in the world—it is creative. These two things are not necessarily wholly opposed or separate. There is, as we’ve seen, the impulse in both science and magic towards universalism, and by no means is science exempt from the play of powers and creativity in the world. Davis describes them as yin and yang (1999, p. 9) as they are mostly themselves but hold within them pieces of their counterpart. We might also understand Spirit and Soul as Campagna’s Essence and Existence (2018, p. 17) Wherein one in concerned with the abstract, the symbolic, presence, and pure information (Essence and Spirit), the other is concerned with materiality, the connections between things, and experience (Existence and Soul). Both thinkers use language as a means of understanding the relationship between their two concepts, whether it be Essence & Existence, or Spirit & Soul.
Davis argues that writing can be seen “as both the most abstract and most intimate of mirrors; with it (literally) in mind, the self can reflect upon itself, sharpening the scalpel of its own introspection and setting itself against the external world.” (1999, p. 35) and that the feelings of alienation and detachment so prevalent in our modern society is in part caused by writing, and media apparatuses. For Campagna as well, language/grammar, and its production of a method of infinite serialization and creation of potentiality is one of the cornerstones of Technic and the hyper-essentialized society it has created. Davis argues that language, and especially writing, are also tools which can lead to mystical revelations, spirituality, and reflection on the self. He states that: “with it (literally) in mind, the self can reflect upon itself, sharpening the scalpel of its own introspection and setting itself against the external world.” (Davis, 1999, p. 35) As for Davis, writing is the method through which the notion of the soul, or an incorporeal spirit within the self—a self disconnected from our material bodies—might exist. It’s through this example of language/writing leading to the conception of the soul that Davis demonstrates the conviction of his book: “that the works of reason cannot be so easily riven from more otherworldly pursuits.” (1999, p. 36) So, we have seen how both Campagna and Davis understand spirituality (and for Campagna, other narrative impulses) and the resurgence of mysticism in our modern day to be inextricably liked with the evolution of our technology. Whether that technology is our systems of information and communication, or even our metaphysical understanding of reality. Both also place the self at the center of mysticism, but why is that, and what is the significance of narrativization in reaction to our modern predicament? And how do either of those things relate to the cyborg?
To answer these questions, we can begin with Gerald Alva Miller Jr.’s book Exploring the Limits of the Human in Science Fiction and in particular his introduction, wherein he posits not only a theory of science fiction, but also the human. For Miller, narrative is the fundamental way in which humans process the world around us, and he argues that because “To be human is to narrate… any attempt to explore the human and its limits must necessarily consider narrative.” (2012, p. 2) If we take the idea that the fundamental way that humans understand and organize our reality is through narrative, we can understand our own cultural moment more clearly, and most especially we can understand the ways in which Campagna and Davis understand the self more clearly. Firstly, this need for narrative reveals another reason why the metaphysics of Technic is so oppressive to the people living in it: Technic negates narrative. Technics ever present drive towards reducing every thing and person to simply a point in a series, that because of its potentiality could be any other point in that series, fundamentally also works to render the connections and interactions between things meaningless, destroying any potential for narratives to have real meaning or real impact.
I want to be clear here that I am not saying that writing a story in the modern age is impossible, or that that story will have no meaning to the people who read it. What I am trying to say is that while one could certainly do that, and people are still affected by narratives, both in creating and reacting to them, they have been rendered just as alienated and inert as the rest of us under Technic, things may be explained or narrativized, but becoming is as impossible as always. Take for example the pervasive feeling, discussed by multiple theorists, philosophers, and historians in our current day, that we no longer have a future. That our society has stagnated and this state of globalized, neoliberal capitalism is all we have to look forward to. As Mark Fisher puts it, the loss of our ability to conceive new futures has resulted in “the acceptance of a situation in which culture would continue without really changing, and where politics was reduced to the administration of an already established (capitalist) system.” It is because of this feeling of the loss of our future that narrative as a tool is so deeply important—and why, consciously or not, it is the method through which people are attempting to take back control of their lives and the world around them.
This is why we find the pushback or simply the reaction to living in the reality-system of Technic to be, if not suicide, then conspiracy theory, spirituality, parasocial relationships, and even cultural studies and dialectics. In a world wherein we see our reality as chaotic, unstable, and being cut into piecemeal by Technic, people are reaching for connections. Davis puts describes it thus: “As information expands beyond its reductive sense as a quantitative measure of meaning, groups and individuals also find room to resist and recast the dominant technological narratives of war and commerce, and to inject their fractured postmodern lives with digitally remastered forms of community, imagination, and cosmic connection.” (1999, p. 11) The ways in which narrative allows for imagination, creation, and becoming are what make it essential for the human, both for Davis and Campagna. We see it echo in their ideas of Soul, Magic, and the self. Using Millers thoughts on science fiction and how narratives are constructed and can be utilized by the genre, we get a better understanding of not just why narrative is important, but why it can be used as such an effective tool, and in particular, a tool for thinking our way out of the strife of our modern day.
One of the reasons that science fiction narratives in particular are so important for Miller is the speculative space that they create, “spaces that often vary so radically from our everyday life that they force us to experience radical difference and compel us to engage in singular productions of meaning.” (Miller, 2012, p. 8) Science fiction is a genre that could be argued to surpass the limitations of genre itself. It deals variously with the future, with technology, with horror, with the fantastical, and the mythologic. It is a genre predicated on turning the familiar strange and new in order to allow it to be analyzed and critiqued. It is no surprise, then, that it is the genre that the figure of the cyborg has found its home in. What is the cyborg as a figure if not the self—the human—pushed to and past an arbitrarily constructed boundary so that we might better understand and think about ourselves, that ineffable dimension that is always with us. The cyborg as a character has become near ubiquitous in popular culture since the 1960s when the term was coined. Although the potential augmentation or evolution of humanity through technology never manifested itself in the way that Clynes and Kline anticipated, the cultural fascination with the cyborg only grew.
As it was pulled into the pop-cultural limelight, the cyborg began taking on new forms and functions, as Donna Haraway demonstrates in her chapter A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century. She describes the cyborg as a cybernetic organism, a hybrid between animal/human and machine, human and animal, and the physical and non-physical. (Haraway, 1988, p. 149) and in doing so she pinpoints the pivotal axis of the cyborg in modern society: it ruptures, deconstructs, and reimagines both social and bodily realities and boundaries. It does this not just literally, in the augmentation of our “natural” bodies, but in the various narratives and ideologies that the cyborg has been representative of. It should not be forgotten that the cyborg emerged from the Cold War, as an emblem of human evolution through technology and has throughout the past century been used as a figurehead for both implicit and explicit eugenicist messaging and ideology. This ultimately stems from the same ideas about the potential of the cyborg that were held by Clynes and Kline, that technology could be used to “upgrade” or “evolve” people, without thought to who may actually have access to that technology. It is an ideology that ignores modern inequalities for the allure of progress for the sake of progress, not bothering to grapple with the ramifications of “upgrading” an (upper) class of people at the expense of the working class. At the expense of anyone those in power deem unfit, explicitly or implicitly.
In spite of this, the cyborg also functions as an incredibly liberatory figure for some people. The use of technology in medicine has had incredible results, from prosthetics, to medications, to having an antenna implanted in one’s skull as in the case of Neil Harbisson. In addition, the cyborg is an integral figure in queer and feminist theory, as Haraway points out, her chapter on the cyborg is “an argument for pleasure in the confusion of boundaries and for responsibility in their construction. It is also an effort to contribute to socialist-feminist culture and theory in a postmodernist, non-naturalist mode and in the utopian tradition of imagining a world without gender, which is perhaps a world without genesis, but maybe also a world without end.” (1988, p. 150) The cyborg redefines the self and the body as malleable things that a person can have control over, that they can shape to be whatever they want. This conception of the cyborg allows for a radical amount of bodily autonomy, and it is no wonder that in this aspect it lends itself as a figure for feminist and queer theory and the fight for bodily autonomy in the face of an oppressive state and culture.
These two aspects of the cyborg are significant because they connect to the reason that Haraway has adopted the figure of the cyborg in her theory of socialist-feminism. Their main trouble is also their main boon: “they are the illegitimate offspring of militarism and patriarchal capitalism, not to mention state socialism. But illegitimate offspring are often exceedingly unfaithful to their origins. Their fathers, after all, are inessential.” (Haraway, 1988, p. 151) It is precisely because the cyborg is a result of Technic, the result of a variety of modern social and societal ills, that it can present a method of critique and liberation from those ills. One of the goals of Haraways writing is to demonstrate the need for active alliance and coalition between people calling for political and social change, in this case feminist movements. She encourages collectivity through “affinity, not identity.” (Haraway, 1988, p. 155) embracing and encouraging active community building rather than people drifting together out of similarity in identities. This is certainly not to say that associating with people of similar identities or interests is wrong, but rather emphasizes the importance of strong collective action in political movements. It is not hard to see the ramifications of Technic and its effects on the people living in it in the social justice movements in the past decades. It is difficult for progress to be made when infighting is so easy to fall into and is only encouraged by the wider media and cultural zeitgeist. Haraway advocates for a universalist perspective on the creation of positive change, and attempts to counter the tribalist rhetoric that has become so common.
It is in this liberatory capacity that I argue the cyborg has become a kind of mystical figure in popular culture. It’s not difficult to see the resonances between Haraway’s work and Campagna and Davis’s. All three reach for the restoration of connection between people, our environment, and ourselves, whilst critiquing the alienation and instrumentalization that are the hallmarks of lived experience in our society. For Campagna, technology is not the issue at the foundation of our world, Technic is. It is our reality-system, our metaphysics that are flawed and that has created the desperate need for the freedom to become and to exist in our culture. The cyborg is nothing if not a figure of becoming. An active representation of the fact that we have power over our bodies, over our selves, and we can become what we want to be, not what is dictated by our place in the series. The cyborg is a magical figure in that it has the capacity to provide the Salvation of Magic and be used as an introduction to a new and “healthier” metaphysics. In relation to Davis, the cyborg is a clear representation of his idea that the self changes with every new technology, whilst also reinforcing the message that humanity is not subject to our own creations. We have not only an incredible capacity for change but an incredible capacity for connection, for the removal of boundaries both metaphorical and physical. The power to access collectivity and positive change through the figure of the cyborg. A mystical figure whose mysticism has laid hidden from us under the guise of technology, whilst containing the same power to instantiate spiritual revelation as writing and the Corpus Hermeticum. (Davis, 1999, p. 42)
To conclude, the cyborg emerged from the crucible of WWII and the Cold War and space race that followed. It has since become an incredibly important figure not only in popular culture but also in political movements, cultural studies, and scientific speculation—wearing many different hats for many different groups. In this essay, we have looked at the cultural and spiritual moment of the New Age onwards until today, with a focus on metaphysical understandings of the world and how change has and may be brought about. In this, we have found the significance of narrative and the speculative space it offers us, the vitality of connection and existence, and the ways in which the cyborg, both as a figure and in the science fictional narratives that focus on it, can function as a spiritual figure or cause a spiritual awakening. The radical rethinking of the self and the human along with a returnal of autonomy is what Campagna, Davis, and Haraway argue for, and it is what we find inscribed in the metal and flesh that makes up the cyborg.
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