In her essay "A Cyborg Manifesto" Donna Haraway
gives a detailed definition of the
cyborg
cybernetic organism made of flesh and technology.
The cyborg, more than any other concept, manifestly reveals one of the most striking discoveries in the recent scholarship in the philosophy:
not only God is dead but also Nature.
Indeed what can be defined as "natural" these days?
Neither gender nor race, neither family nor reproduction.
Thanks to new technologies (microelectronics, biotechnology, genetic engineering) almost anything can be discussed using the semantics of the cyborg, as everything, humans and objects, can be conceptualized in terms of assembly and disassembly. Any part can be connected with any other one according to common codes elaborated by Language and Technology.
"Biological organisms have become biotic systems, communications devices like others"
In her attempt to build "an ironic political mith faithful to feminism, socialism and materialism" Donna Haraway develops a complex network of thoughts (a sort of rhyzome ), all related, in a way or another, to the "cyborg" concept.
The cyborg concept allows Haraways :
to find a perfect subject for her feminist theory of objectivity based on the situated, partial and embodied knowledge (the cyborg has a deconstructed identity, escaping the classical distinction between man and woman)
to go over post-modernist theories that see technology only as a powerful mechanism of control (the cyborg represents a positive vision of the relationship between man and technology
to re-think the unity of the human being thanks to the cyborg virtuality of a body that is a mix of organism/technology and can be seen as a "material-semiotic generative node" because it is a sort of platform for multiple codes of information from genetics to computer science.
A number of striking correspondences clearly illustrate the ways in which the Mexican painter Frida Kahlo (1907-1954)
is an example of the cybernetic icon.


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