The simple cyborgs

I had never really heard of a "cyborg" until I read Donna Haraway's "A Cyborg Manifesto", and evidently neither had my computer, which kept underlining the term as a misspelled word. However, after reading the document I have come to realize that I have been familiar with cyborgs for some time now; I just didn't know there was a specific term for them. 

There are many places in the text (both in the introduction and the actual document) where lines stand out as offering a definition of a cyborg. A cyborg is: 

• "a cybernetic organism, a hybrid of machine and organism, a creature of social reality as well as a creature of fiction" (516)
  
• "our ontology; it gives us our politics...In the traditions of 'Western' science and politics--the tradition of racist, male-dominated capitalism; the tradition of the appropriation of nature as resource for the productions of culture; the tradition of reproduction of the self from the reflections of the other" (516)
  
• "resolutely committed to partiality, irony, intimacy, and perversity. It is oppositional, utopian, and completely without innocence" (517)
  
• "a kind of disassembled and reassembled, post-modern collective and personal self. This is what the self feminist must code" (524)
  
• "the people who refuse to disappear on cue, no matter how many times a 'Western' commentator remarks on the sad passing of another primitive, another organic group done in by 'Western' technology, by writing" (532)
  

With these diverse clues about the definition of a cyborg as well as the three different types of boundaries transgressed by cyborgs (human/animal; animal-human/machine; physical/non-physical) it quickly became apparent to me that cyborgs are all around us in our culture. One specific example of where I personally have seen them ties into Haraway's discussion of the role of cyborgs in medicine. I found this angle to be especially familiar: while at UTC last semester, I had a professor who (due to recent knee surgery) had become very interested in body rhetorics and what happens to a writer when they are not "whole" or "organic" any longer whether due to a cadaver or a machine. 

While the information about cyborgs available through Haraway suggests that they can suggest that cyborgs be complicated machines built by humans, I found it refreshing to see the simple ways that cyborgs are already in our society.