Biomedical Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
by machines.” But he advises that such fears are groundless, since human
beings have by now thoroughly merged with mechanical devices in wide-
ranging conditions of hybridity. “Where does the threat come from?” he
asks. “From those who seek to reduce it to an essence and who—by
scorning things, objects, machines and the social, . . . make humanism a
fragile and precious thing at risk of being overwhelmed by Nature,
Society or God.”
33
Even more explicit as an advocate of ideas about the condition of
humanity as thoroughly infused with the projects and products on con-
temporary technoscience is Donna J. Haraway, whose writings have
inspired a vast literature on cyborgs and what she calls “promising mon-
sters.” Humans, in her view, are merely one of a vast range of entities
that have finally been removed from anything resembling their original
biological condition and are now subject to powerful, intellectually chal-
lenging acts of “transgressive border-crossing.” Her category “cyborg”
includes much more than the human/machine creations described in cold
war research documents and depicted in sci-fi films such as
Terminator
.
Haraway writes that “cyborg figures—such as the end-of-the-millennium
seed, chip, gene, database, bomb, fetus, race, brain, and ecosystem—are
the offspring of implosions of subjects and objects and of the natural
and artificial.”
34
Needed today, in Haraway's grand narrative (which she
terms a “modest-witness”), are wide-ranging, feminist deconstructions
that reveal the character of these “implosions” and give us ways of think-
ing about their products unbiased by benighted programs of scientific
and philosophical discourse received from previous generations.
To focus on cyborgs and their histories, in Haraway's view, is merely
to recognize things that already exist and/or are rapidly coming to be.
Yes, their features sometimes strike many people as grotesque. But rather
than recoil in horror at even the most unsettling hybrids produced by
contemporary technoscience, one must seek to find kinship with the
cascade of synthesized, recombinant entities and creatures that increas-
ingly populate the world. She asks, “Who are my kin in this odd world
of promising monsters, vampires, surrogates, living tools, and aliens?
What kinds of crosses and offspring count as legitimate and illegitimate,
to whom and at what cost?” One of the beings she recognizes as kin,
for example, is the genetically modified OncoMouse—bred explicitly for
research that seeks cures for cancer—a creature she calls “my sister.”
