ABSTRACT
The cyborg is often said to challenge the subject-object and mind-matter oppositions associated with Cartesian dualism. Donna Haraway’s 1985 “A Cyborg Manifesto” made the challenge explicit: “Late twentieth century machines have made thoroughly ambiguous the difference between natural and artificial … and many other distinctions that apply to organisms and machines” (1991: 152). Haraway’s cyborg implied a blurring of ontological distinctions between humans and machines, and this blurring of machine-human distinctions appeared to subvert received social distinctions and hierarchies related to nature and artifice, machine and human. Today, however, as Katherine Hayles (2006: 159–60) remarks: “the cyborg no longer offers the same heady brew of resistance and co-option. Quite simply, it is not networked enough.” Computation and communication technologies seem to have outstripped the cyborg.
