Cyborg Citizen: Politics in the Posthuman Age

Gray, Chris Hables. Cyborg Citizen: Politics in the Posthuman Age. New York: Routledge, 2002. Reviewed along with Prefiguring Cyberculture: An Intellectual Historyby Veronica Hollinger in "Technoculture All the Way Down," Science Fiction Studies #94 = 31.3 (November 2004): 444-51, our primary source for this citation and annotation.[1]

From Hollinger's opening paragraph:

Here are two quite different but equally significant additions to recent scholarly attempts to come to some understanding of the effects of contemporary technoculture on both individuals and communities. Apart from their usefulness as exemplary technocultural studies, I consider that anyone with an interest in the fortunes of science fiction will find these books particularly worthwhile. Each of them recognizes in science fiction the narrative genre most in tune with the future-oriented hi-tech present, the most suitable genre through which to dramatize the potential consequences of ongoing technoscientific development. Cyborg Citizen is a critical overview of some of the ways in which the individual subject is being constructed in/by technoculture, with a particular focus on the political implications of such constructions. [....] (p. 444)

Hollinger quotes Gray's assertion “We live in a cyborg society, no matter how unmodified we are as individuals” (Gray 2), a cyborg society that is changing — evolving — fast. "Although he tends to maintain his focus on the results of the human/machine interface, his introductory remarks provide a more inclusive description of 'cyborg' than is often deployed by post-Harawayan scholars:

A cyborg is a self-regulating organism that combines the natural and the artificial together in one system. Cyborgs do not have to be part human, for any organism/system that mixes the evolved and the made, the living and the inanimate, is technically a cyborg. This would include biocomputers based on organic processes, along with roaches with implants and bioengineered microbes. (quoting Gray 2, Hollinger p. 445)

RDE, Initial Compiler, 23July19