I strongly disagreed with Harraway on various occasions about her claim that we are all cyborgs. I did feel that her personal experiences in her life were interfering with her thoughts and she was not independently writing her claims about the human nature. I also did feel Harraway as a feminist saw men as beings without any feelings attached to them partially due to her experience with her husband. I still disagree with her but agree with her on limited perspectives. I will not call ourselves cyborgs but beings whose very human natures automatically continue to fight with various outer forces of our humanly created environments from technological to traditional ways of attending events.
It must be true that we are still humans because our human nature can be very fragile against diseases yet it can be very rough against other environmental conditions. Recently, I was a reading an article about a girl who had an artificial heart because her regular heart stopped functioning. After a certain period of time, her bodies begin not accepting the artificial heart and put her own heart into functioning. Yes, during this process she was definitely a cyborg according to Harraway’s definition. We must also acknowledge our bodies do not always accept things that do not go along with its own operations. Sometimes it approves or disapproves artificially created products by humans. During organ donations, we will from time to time read that certain people’s bodies do not adapt to the organ inserted and they have to take it out and put a new one in. It’s the same thing with our blood types; we can accept certain blood types and not accept others. Again on this context, it might really seem as if we are really cyborgs with certain genetic or other coding inserted in us. But what determines this coding? Well, it’s easy to answer, various environment factors, we are born on this earth and it transforms and shapes our beings through various environmental factors. We get chicken pox and do not ever get it again because our bodies’ memory remembers it and learns how to protect itself. Even robots are nowadays shaped or manufactured to operate in rough environmental factors. Robots that are sent to Mars can be a great example.
Yes, I agree we must be making some sort of advancement in understanding operations of the human body. I see a tiny light present in this advancement. We will never know everything about our human natures. It does not matter how much steroids, chemicals, or other artificially created things we insert in our bodies, it continues to regulate its operations based on our wrong doings. More importantly, it knows how to adapt without any consciousness action. I think a regular cyborg would break down in seconds and not operate during these circumstances. Or it would blow up the whole facility because it can not find love or friendship like that of in the Frankstein movie. We can be “cyborgs” but we will never get the right picture of what does it mean to be a human spiritually. There are other forces in our earth which are not physically and materialistically visible. Like the air we breathe or the space we use to move around to live our lives is absolutely invisible. We can not come to conclusion about our cyborg nature too soon yet it is not wrong to pull out cyborg like qualities of human nature. When exposed to certain settings, we are definitely cyborgs like that of the work place.
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