ASSIGNMENT COVER SHEET

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Institute for Interactive MEDIA & LEARNING

95567 DIGITAL MEDIA IN SOCIAL CONTEXT

Assessment Task: 4

Student Name: Duan Sebastian

Student Number: 10759746

Assignment Title (if relevant): Cyborg: Development and

Intentionality

Lecturer/Supervisor: Viveka Weiley

Word Count/ Content: 1596

I hereby certify that this assignment is my own work, based

on my personal study and/or research, and that I have
acknowledged all material and sources used in the preparation
of this assignment. I also certify that the assignment has
not previously been submitted for assessment and that I have
not copied in part or whole or otherwise plagiarised the work
of other students.

Signed Date 23/04/09

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Cybor g: Development and Intentionality

Duan Sebastian 10759746

Skin is deceiving… in life, one only has one’s skin… there is a bad exchange in human relations because one is

never what one has… I never have the skin of what I am . There is no exception to the rule because I am never

what I have. (Zylinska 2002: p.172)

The line between human and cyborg has been extensively debated in philosophical academia

(Selinger 2008: p.317), but for the purposes of this paper it shall encompass any merging or

embodiment of technology with the organic (Haraway 1991: p.150). Donna Haraway’s “A Cyborg

Manifesto” (1991) contests that “the cyborg is our ontology”, a futuristic myth turned modern reality

(Haraway 1991: p.150). Verbeek (2008) and Jensen (2008) analyse the metaphysical implications of

this posited cyborg ontology, discoursing the socio-geographic (Jensen 2008) and political (Haraway

1991) implications. “Intentionality is the power of minds to be about, to represent, or to stand for,

things, properties and states of affairs” (Stanford University Encyclopaedia 2003: para. 1). In his

paper “Cyber Intentionality: Rethinking the phenomenology of human-technology relations”, Verbeek analyses the

concept of cyborg in terms of intentionality, distinguishing three types of “cyborg intentionality”

(Verbeek 2008: p.387): technologically mediated, hybrid and composite. In “Developing/development

cyborgs”, Jensen analyses cyborgs in terms of development initiatives, especially in low-tech scenarios

in developing countries. In this paper, I will compare and contrast Jensen’s analyses of cyborgs with

Verbeek’s three states of cyborg intentionality, respectively.

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 “Technologically mediated intentionality occurs when human intentionality takes place ‘through’

technological artefacts”. (Verbeek 2008: p.387) This type of intentionality encompasses any

experience where technology mediates our experiences, including embodied, interactive or background

technology relations (Verbeek 2008: p.387). Examples include a wheel chair as embodied artefact,

“intelligent” washing machines as interactive device or the whirring of computer fans as background

sound-scape, respectively. Since these experiences are not possible without the mediated

technological device, they are defined as technologically mediated. A living example of a “cyborg”

embodied by a mediated technology is investigative scientist, Steve Mann. Mann has been described

as “the world’s first cyborg” and “the inventor of the wearable computer” (Mann 2001: p.4). Since

the 1980s, he has endured ridicule experimenting in public by wearing bulky devices to hinder, alter

or enhance his experiences of the world (Mann 2001: p.5). This technologically mediated experience

of the world has impacted Mann and those in contact with him on many levels. For example, at a

protest in Toronto, he and his students were wearing devices that automatically broadcast the event

“through their eyes” onto the web, “almost subconsciously” (Mann 2001: pp.175-7). These real-time

depictions were vastly different to that of the media, realised in a more immediate portrayal of events.

Whereas Verbeek analyses cyborg intentionality, Jensen deconstructs Donna Haraway’s claim

that “The actors are Cyborg, Nature is Coyote, and the geography is elsewhere.” (Jensen 2008:

p.375). Jensen argues that we have become “postmodern cyborgs” (Jensen 2008: p.377), our lives

infused and mediated by technology, embodied in high-tech western culture. Jensen argues that there

was no significantly historical moment where we broke with the past and entered a cyborg era,

suggesting we have always been cyborgs in one form or another. By this logic, if we consider rock as

tool being the leading technology of the caveman, perhaps it implicates caveman as cyborg, where the

rock is an embodied mediating technology. Jensen disputes the “epochal uniqueness” of a new cyborg

era (Jensen 2008: p.377) breaking from the past, suggesting the boundaries between humans and

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technologies are ever fragile. Rather, he widens the scope, suggesting “cyborgs are a marker of an

ontologically non-humanist disposition… bodies and minds [part] of assemblages or networks”

(2008: p.377-8), leading to his discourse on low-tech, development cyborgs in developing nations.

“Hybrid intentionality occurs when the technological actually merges with the human.” (Verbeek

2008: p.387) This form of intentionality relates to a bionic form beyond human (Verbeek 2008:

p.391), technology embedded in flesh or vice-versa, biology and machine an integral part of the

other. Rather than covering extraneous devices such as the use of spectacles or mobile phones, this

definition is limited to interdependent components fused together, like artificial pacemakers within

the body, or antidepressants regulating emotional states (Verbeek 2008: p.391). This is often a

controversial area, leading to famous lawsuits like that in 1969 when Doctors failed in their attempt

to replace Haskell Karps’s heart with an artificial pump (Gray 2001, pp.76-7). Verbeek questions

what it is to be human, suggesting the posthumanist approach implies moving beyond humanism, while

the transhumanist (Hughes 2004: p.155) approach recognizes human-technology as physical fusion.

We are a cyborg entity, “successor of Homo sapiens” (Verbeek 2008: p.391), “hybrid intentionality”.

Jensen (2008) focuses not only on the cyborg as individual but from a socio-geographical and

political perspective. Technologies directly and indirectly affect political decision-making, whether it

be starting a war or conducting social experiments to curb population growth, resulting in the

development of “low-tech cyborg subjectivities and bodies” (Jensen 2008: p.380). Jensen investigates

Haraway’s statement that “geography is everywhere” (1991, p.21), taking developing countries as the

geography in relation to their use of “development cyborgs” (Jensen 2008: p.378). Jensen describes a

national family planning program in the Meratus Mountains (Jensen 2008: p.379), where local leaders

were expected to “enrol forty women” (Jensen 2008: p.380) into the state-sanctioned program. The

desired human/contraception low-tech cyborg might have been described as “hybrid intentionality”

(Verbeek 2008: p.387). This is an example of socio-geographic cyborg subjectivity where political

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might works jointly with technology for a desired goal. In this case, the 1980s Indonesian Family

Planning Program failed to meet its goal, since the women who were signed up explored the potential

health benefits of mixing oral contraceptives with traditional herbs instead of following the program.

In this case, the “artefacts of medical science” of the West were transformed into “icons of

bureaucratic order”, development technologies “intertwining with existing subjectivities, bodies and

effects” (Jensen 2008: p.380).

“Composite intentionality is the addition of human intentionality and the intentionality of

technological artefacts.” (Verbeek 2008: p.387) As a technological artefact, a tape recorder

experiences sound differently to humans, generally recording background sounds louder than

humans perceive it to be, thereby having its own technological intentionality (Verbeek 2008: p.392).

This type of technologically generated experience of the world is defined as a “Hermeneutic”

relation, including that experienced using thermometers, spectrographs and other measuring devices

(Verbeek 2008: p.392). Verbeek argues that composite intentionality incorporates both the

intentionality of the technology and that of the humans “towards the result of this technological

intentionality” (Verbeek 2008: p.393) Examples of this composite form include photographers who

take long-exposure photographs, capturing an experience of the world that the human eye alone

cannot experience.

Perhaps we might consider Jensen’s “developing/development cyborgs” (Jensen 2008: p.382)

in terms of a collective cyborg, a group intentionality merging with a technological intentionality. If

“Development cyborgs” (Jensen 2008: p.382) describe a low-tech infusion with developing societies,

such as the family planning initiative in the Meratus Mountains, we might use Verbeek’s analysis to

define this as a collective, “mediated intentionality”. Since the forty women did not take the oral

contraceptives as hoped, this mediated, political offensive failed to realize its desired developing

(collective) cyborg of “hybrid intentionality” (Jensen 2008: p.382).

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 Having now compared Verbeek’s three states of cyborg intentionality with Jensen’s

“developing/development cyborgs”, let’s now look at some more examples that suggest

deconstruction in these terms. Gray (2001: p. 166-8) analyses the positives and negatives of

computer-aided education, a mediated learning experience distancing the student from face-to-face

classes. In this example, older students who are goal-oriented, self-disciplined and flexible tend to

succeed in computer-based learning programs, whilst younger or less self-motivated students tend to

do poorly. Gray argues the popularity of computer-based learning tools and programs through to

university level has been politically and militarily motivated. He further suggests that the intent of

this collective, mediated cyborg is to push high–tech education that “undermine[s] education [aiming]

to foster citizens, instead turning it into a profit-making enterprise that produce[s] useful workers.”

(Gray 2001: p.167) Like Verbeek, Cranny-Francis and Hawkins agree that wearable technologies are

embodied by the user, a “negotiable… flexible [and] permeable frontier.” (Cranny-Francis &

Hawkins 2008: p.267). This article likens embodied technology to a man on Mars who believes a

building on the planet has adapted to his survival needs, when in fact it has transformed him into a

Martian. Similarly, humans and wearable technologies are in constant flux, the wearer changed by

and changing cybernetic relations. We are the technology we create.

It is never our objective body that we move, but our phenomenal body, and there is no mystery in that, since our

body, as the potentiality of this or that part of the world, surges towards objects to be grasped and perceives them.

(Jensen 2008: p.375)

Verbeek and Jensen both reference Haraway in their analyses and deconstruction of the

cyborg. Verbeek discerns and defines three types of cyborg intentionality, ranging from

technologically mediated such as a person wearing spectacles, to hybrid forms where technology and

the organic are intertwined, through to composite, where the technology itself plays a central role in

the intentionality of the whole. Jensen refers specifically to Haraway’s postulation, that “…actors are

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Cyborg … Geography is elsewhere” (Jensen 2008: p.375), leaping from this into his discourse on

developing cyborgs in development initiatives. Jensen discusses the embodied cyborg from the

impact of the macro (collective) cyborg on the micro (individual), low-tech cyborg. Verbeek also

redefines the embodied cyborg at the micro level, but more deeply examines the boundaries of the

cyborg in both hybrid and composite states of intentionality.

Duan Sebastian

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 References:

1. Cranny-Francis, A. & Hawkins, C. 2008, ‘Wearable Technology’, Visual Communication, vol. 7, issue 3, pp. 363-

382.

2. Gray, C. H. 2001, Cyborg Citizen: Politics in the Posthuman Age, Routledge, New York.

3. Haraway, D. 1991a, A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century,

Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (New York; Routledge, 1991), pp.149-181, viewed 22

April 2009, <http://www.stanford.edu/dept/HPS/Haraway/CyborgManifesto.html>.

4. Hughes, J. 2004, Citizen Cyborg: Why Democratic Societies Must Respond to the Redesigned Human of the Future,

Westview Press, USA.

5. Jensen, C. B., 2008, ‘Developing/Development Cyborgs’, Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences, vol. 7, issue

3, pp.375-385.

6. Mann, S. with Niedzviecki, H. 2001, Cyborg: Digital Destiny and Human Possibility in the age of the Wearable

Computer, Doubleday, Canada.

7. Mitchell, W. J. 2003, Me++: The Cyborg Self and the Networked City, The MIT Press, Massachusetts.

8. Selinger, E., 2008 ‘Introduction: Cyborg embodiment: Affect, agency, intentionality, and Responsibility’, Phenomenology

and the Cognitive Sciences, vol. 7, issue 3, pp. 317-325.

9. Stanford University Encyclopaedia 2003, Intentionality, Stanford University Encyclopaedia, viewed 23 April

2009, <http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/intentionality/>.

10. Verbeek, P., 2008 ‘Cyborg intentionality: Rethinking the phenomenology of human-technology relations’, Phenomenology

and the Cognitive Sciences, vol. 7, issue 3, pp. 387-395.

11. Zylinska, J. 2002, The Cyborg Experiments: the extensions of the body in the media Age, Continuum, New

York.