"The cyborg, or cybernetic organism, implies that the conscious mind steers--the meaning of the Greek
kybernetes--our organic life. ... The more we mistake the cyberbodies for ourselves, the more the machine twists ourselves into the prostheses we are wearing" (Heim, Michael. The Metaphysics of Virtual Reality. New York: Oxford, 1993, p.101)
As an instrument of domination, the electronic processing of information "can be condensed into the metaphor C3Icyborg, a hybrid creature which muddles if not erases the distinction
between human and machine. The body of the cyborg, a motley of organic material and prosthesis, explodes the phallocentric
myth of bodily unity upon which systems of domination (patriarchy, compulsory heterosexuality, racism, et al.) are predicated.
The cyborg represents, therefore, a potentially insurgent force: "Feminist cyborg stories have the task of recoding
communication and intelligence to subvert command and control" (Haraway 175).
Cybernetics was defined by Norbert Wiener as "The theory of control in engineering, whether human or animal or mechanical," and he saw this as "a chapter in the theory of messages" which would include "not only the study of language but the study of messages as a means of controlling machinery and society, the development of computing machines and other such automata, certain reflections upon psychology and the nervous system, and a tentative new theory of scientific method" (Cybernetics: or Control and Communication in Animal and Machine, 1948). He
took the name from the Greek word for "steersman," "helmsman," "pilot," (=> Latin, "gubernator"), "navigator," "guide": our "skipper".
"...society can only be understood through a study of the messages and the
communication facilities which belong to it"
(Wiener, The Human Use of Human Beings: Cybernetics and Society, 1950, 9).
We will all become texts in which the culture reads back to itself the computer codes inscribed on our
bodies. The posthuman will be the governor--the kybernetes or pilot--in the inscription loop between
the ultimate controlling technology of cybernetics (I call it "ultimate" because it defines the technology of selfhood, of mental identity of cognition, of the mind, of intelligence itself). (Porush, David. "Hacking the Brainstem: Postmodern Metaphysics and Stephenson's Snow Crash," in Markley, ed.,
pp. 107-142., 123).
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