10.6092/issn.2038-3460/17747
This cross-disciplinary exploration delves into the multifaceted intersections of technology, embodiment, identity, and ecology through the lens of cyborg knowing. The first contribution focuses on the vulnerabilities faced by individuals with implantable cardiac defibrillators (ICDs), emphasizing the crucial need for acclimatization strategies and agency in navigating their cybernetic embodiment as “everyday cyborg”. The second contribution critically examines cultural technologies revealing their role in perpetuating biases and advocates for interdisciplinary approaches, drawing on feminist STS and cyborg theory, to adaptively reshape societal constructs. Lastly, the third contribution envisions a comprehensive theory of cyberzoa that extends the cyborg figuration to encompass nonhuman animals, fostering a post-anthropocentric perspective and an ecologically attuned examination of power relations, exploitation, and symmetrical relationships. By engaging with the concept of the cyborg, these contributions shed light on the complex dynamics and transformative potentials inherent in the realm of technology for both human and nonhuman lives.
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Federica Timeto
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Tecnoscienza – Italian Journal of Science & Technology Studies
ecology
Cyborg Figurations: Exploring the Intersections of Technology, Embodiment, Identity, and Ecology
Text.Serial.Journal
https://tecnoscienza.unibo.it/
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Crossing Boundaries
2023-09-26
2023-07-26
2023-09-26
2023-09-26
123-154
TS
Federica Timeto
2023/09/26
10.6092/issn.2038-3460/17747
123
Ca’ Foscari University
2038-3460
1
ecology
en
154
Cyborg Figurations: Exploring the Intersections of Technology, Embodiment, Identity, and Ecology
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14
T/S                                                                                  CROSSING BOUNDARIES



Cyborg Figurations: Exploring the Intersections of Technology,
Embodiment, Identity, and Ecology

Gill Haddow                          Cecilia Åsberg                        Federica Timeto
University of Edinburgh              Linköping University                  Ca' Foscari University of Venice



Corresponding author                    Abstract
Gill Haddow                             This cross-disciplinary exploration delves into the multifaceted intersec-
Department of Science Technology        tions of technology, embodiment, identity, and ecology through the lens of
and Innovation Studies, School of       cyborg knowing. The first contribution focuses on the vulnerabilities faced
Social and Political Sciences,          by individuals with implantable cardiac defibrillators (ICDs), emphasizing
University of Edinburgh                 the crucial need for acclimatization strategies and agency in navigating
Old Surgeons’ Hall, High School         their cybernetic embodiment as “everyday cyborg”. The second contribu-
Yards, Edinburgh, UK, EH11LZ            tion critically examines cultural technologies revealing their role in perpet-
   gill.haddow@ed.ac.uk                 uating biases and advocates for interdisciplinary approaches, drawing on
                                        feminist STS and cyborg theory, to adaptively reshape societal constructs.
Submitted: April, 2023                  Lastly, the third contribution envisions a comprehensive theory of cyber-
Accepted: June, 2023                    zoa that extends the cyborg figuration to encompass nonhuman animals,
                                        fostering a post-anthropocentric perspective and an ecologically attuned
                                        examination of power relations, exploitation, and symmetrical relation-
                                        ships. By engaging with the concept of the cyborg, these contributions
                                        shed light on the complex dynamics and transformative potentials inher-
                                        ent in the realm of technology for both human and nonhuman lives.

                                        Keywords
                                        everyday cyborgs; techno-organic hybridity; cyberzoa; embodiment; ecology.




Implantable Cardiac Devices and the Vulnerabilities of Every-
day Cyborgs
Gill Haddow


1. Introduction

   In popular film and media, especially in the genres of horror or science-fiction (SF) the image of
the “cyborg” has come to be synonymous with the inhuman; monsters created to terrify the view-
er due to their superhuman abilities but less than human emotions and feelings. I argue however
that the term cyborg needs to be reclaimed from these popular stereotypes. I advocate for increas-

TECNOSCIENZA. Italian Journal of Science & Technology Studies                    © The Author(s) 2023
14(1) pp. 123-154 ISSN 2038-3460                                                 Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)
DOI: 10.6092/issn.2038-346/10 4
                              7 7                                                www.tecnoscienza.net
Haddow, Åsberg and Timeto                                                                       124

ing recognition to be given to the existence of “everyday cyborgs” in society as well as recognition
given to the vulnerabilities that accompany their creation (see Oudshoorn 2015; Haddow 2021).
   Everyday cyborgs are a specific example of techno-organic hybridity created through the
process of medical cyborgisation. Implantable Cardiac Defibrillators (ICDs) are implanted
medical devices which sense an abnormally fast heart rate that could progress to a sudden car-
diac arrest (SCA). The ICD reacts by setting off a series of small electrical shocks termed “cardi-
oversion” attempting to stop the fast heart rate. The ICD then re-senses and evaluates whether
a larger shock is required to “defibrillate” the heart to stop the life-threatening rhythm. These
events are communicated to health professionals either remotely from the device itself or
through investigation by the clinicians in hospital. Due to these capabilities I argue that ICDs
are cybernetic devices and when placed within an organism, the “everyday cyborg” is created.
   In order to understand the everyday cyborg life, twenty-one face-to-face interviews with
everyday ICD cyborgs and thirteen of their significant others were conducted. Findings
demonstrated that there were two ways in which new vulnerabilities can occur: 1) living with
techno-organic hybridity and 2) seeking control over a cybernetic technology that can be seen
and felt but cannot be reached or removed.
   The first vulnerability results from the surgical insertion of the ICD and the “invasion” of
the medical device into the body. The ICD is implanted generally on the left-hand side of the
chest and the outline of the device can be seen on the body. This can result in a heightened
awareness for the everyday cyborg of their body which has been now modified into a tech-
no-organic hybrid of human and technology. Usually, the experience of the body is one charac-
terised by a general lack of awareness and absence. Implanting a medical device such as an ICD
turns this original “absence” into a presence or as Drew Leder refers to it as a “dys-appearance”
whereby the body’s original absence becomes absent (Leder 1991). Yet over time, along with
the everyday cyborg’s acceptance and acknowledgement that the ICD is a form of protection
and a “part of them” rather than a threat, the ICD transforms into a corporeal structure of the
body, as well as into the background of life facilitating a return to “absence” once more.
   Relatedly, the second vulnerability stems from the activity of the ICD should it emit a
shock. The ICD is a cybernetic device that can prevent a SCA by emitting a series of increas-
ingly powerful electrical shocks. Its activity is autonomous and out of the control of the every-
day cyborg. In interviews with everyday cyborgs they narrated the strategies (such as excesses
of activity) that can show that the everyday cyborg caused the ICD’s activity. In doing so, they
position themselves as the orchestrator of the ICD’s activity as opposed to a passive recipient
of it. Such strategies enable the everyday cyborg to accept the ICD as part of their body when
implanted and if the ICD activates it then allows them to believe they are the ones in control.
   This leads to the conclusion that the vulnerabilities created by medical cyborgisation pro-
cesses are eventually (and repeatedly) overcome through strategies of acclimatisation.


2. Different Cyborg Representations

  There is a rise in the number of modern medical implants that are “smart”, i.e., devices
that are sensitive, responsive and autonomous in their functionality when compared to the
125                                                                     Tecnoscienza. 2023. 14(1)

static and stationary hip or knee joints, artificial skin and implanted corneas (Haddow, Har-
mon et al. 2016). ICDs are one of these increasingly “smart” implanted medical technologies
and as mentioned they have features of an autonomous feedback mechanism operating as a
closed loop system. ICDs can be considered a prime example of medical implanted cybernetic
circuits as homeostatic systems because they are a reinforcement system based on circular
causation processes. Indeed, ICDs are playing an accepted and increasingly “normalised role”
in peoples’ lives and are becoming mundane, ubiquitous and everyday (Harmon et al. 2015;
Haddow et al. 2016). The relatively common medical practice of inserting ICDs into the
human heart creates an “ICD cyborg” or an “everyday cyborg” (Oudshoorn 2015; Haddow
2021). The “everyday” of the “everyday cyborg” highlights that the “mundane” and “hidden”
is important for discussions about their creation, not least, because the implants are literally
hidden inside the body, but because much of what is discussed about cyborgs does not focus
on their existence and what a routine day is like for some, with even fewer reviewing the
“technological mediatedness of human subjectivity” (Schraube 2009). “Everyday cyborgs”
as the “new normal” of living a modified cyborg life, is an achievement that cannot be tak-
en-for-granted and requires strategies of acclimatisation and therefore there is huge value in
reclaiming the term for this purpose (Das 2010).
   However, the genesis of the original cyborg was of a future space traveller and not of an
earth dweller. Clynes and Kline in their original definition of a cybernetic organism (Clynes
and Kline 1960) offer the original definition of the cyborg, of the cybernetic organism, as
human beings whose bodies were modified not so they can continue to live on earth, but so
that human beings with body modifications could one day travel in space. These future tech-
no-organic human hybrids were the cyborg astronauts of the future. “For the exogenously
extended organizational complex functioning as an integrated homeostatic system uncon-
sciously, we propose the term ‘Cyborg’” (Clynes and Kline 1960, 27). Despite the origins
of the term cyborg and the everydayness of cybernetic implantable medical technologies
such as ICDs, in the public imagination the term is most commonly associated with images
presented in popular horror and science-fiction (SF) films. The T-800 android in the first
The Terminator franchise (1984, dir.: James Cameron) and the Alex Murphy cyborg in José
Padilha’s (1987/2014) Robocop, typify such representations of male gendered, uber-violent,
overtly masculinised and devoid of recognisable human emotions. These well-known cyborg
and android monsters generally have the physical attributes of strength and power and overt
musculature co-existent with the dominant Western idea of masculinity (Connell 1995).
   The last version of the cyborg and one that is more well known in academic discussions, is the
version of the “cyborg” used by Donna Haraway (1991), simply defined here as a blended identi-
ty to challenge the construction of dualisms, such as sex and gender, or human and machine urg-
ing that the “cybernetic organism, a hybrid of machine and organism, [was] a creature of social
reality as well as a creature of fiction” (1991, 119). She argues that C3I (command-control-com-
munication-intelligence) is the essential code for modern war (1991, 150) of which C3I can be
interpreted as a cybernetic system previously outlined by Clynes and Kline (1960). Of particu-
lar importance is making evident the vulnerabilities that the experience of cyborgisation brings
however. I therefore turn to what becoming and being a cyborg entails as a human experience.
Haddow, Åsberg and Timeto                                                                               126

3. Cyborg Voices

   Research reports that there is enhanced life function and improved quality of life from
being implanted with an ICD, yet there is also research that suggests living the techno-organic
hybrid life of an everyday cyborg can have detrimental effects on some recipients.
   All cardiac patients may develop some illness identity dislocations as they suffer from hav-
ing heart disease, condition or arrest as well as from a possible near-death experience (Char-
maz 1987). Indeed, psychological studies conducted with ICD patients repeatedly document
the prevalence of anxiety, depression and even anger in the ICD population (Sakensa 1994;
Duru et al. 2001; Pedersen et al. 2008; Yuhas et al. 2012; Vriesendorp et al. 2013). This data
cannot describe whether these emotions are a result of the implantation of the ICD, the acti-
vation of ICD and discharging a shock or were pre-existing tendencies relating to the nature
of the heart condition. Studies have repeatedly shown that anxiety is heightened in patients
whose ICDs have fired to prevent a heart arrhythmia, compared to those who have not ex-
perienced shocks (Hegel 1997; Dougherty 1995). The shock that the ICD emits is shocking
both in terms of the pain that it causes as well as the unexpectedness of its occurrence. Nelly
Oudshoorn suggests that “[H]aving a machine inside your body without knowing when or
where it may jolt you induces feelings of disbelief and anxiety” leading her to discuss the new
vulnerabilities that ICDs cause (2016, 8). She goes on to highlight how cyborgisation leads to
new types of vulnerability “as an internal rather than an external threat and as harm you may
try to anticipate but can never escape” (Oudshoorn 2016, 267). Indeed, scholars in Science
and Technology Studies (STS) and Body Studies draw attention to the importance of the
experiential basis of cyborgisation showing how the “cyborg” condition is created and exists
as an empirical entity (Bjorn and Markussen 2013; Oudshoorn 2015). Hence, in order to fur-
ther understand what is different in the everyday cyborg life when compared to the experience
of cardiac associated illness, as well as the strategies of acclimatisation used to becoming and
being an everyday cyborg twenty-one face-to-face interviews with everyday ICD cyborgs and
thirteen of their significant others were conducted. With National Health Service (NHS) eth-
ical approvals, participants were recruited using NHS gatekeepers and a consent-to-consent
approach. Pseudonyms are used in the following accounts.

  3.1 Living with techno-organic hybridity

   For the ICD everyday cyborg, the cyborgisation process begins from the moment when
the ICD is surgically implanted. The ICD is not implanted in the body to the same depth
as a transplanted organ might be. In fact, it bulges slightly on the left hand side of the upper
chest causing a reverse silhouette. This is the spot where the everyday cyborg was created as a
new techno-organic hybrid and its presence can be felt even when it is inert. Stella suggested:

     I can feel it [ICD], sometimes, if I’m lying down, it’ll jut out a bit more and I’ll go… (making
     movement to push it back).

  Alfred commented that:
127                                                                                 Tecnoscienza. 2023. 14(1)

      Well, I’m really quite thankful… But, it is a bit of an inconvenience, because it does stick up
      and, you know, you can, when you’re sleeping, it’s kind of interferes if you’re on one side.

  The scar and the skin silhouette, serves as a reminder of the everyday cyborg’s mortality,
albeit one not resulting from SCA. John describes it as:

      John: And it’s almost like… and I don’t want, I don’t want to be… it’s a bit like being
      continually reminded that you’ve got this condition. I mean, in some respects I would
      rather just blend into society and just become an ordinary person again, you know.
      Gill: Do you not think you’re an ordinary person?
      John: Well, I feel I’m… to some extent I feel extraordinary because I feel…
      Gill: Extraordinary [laughing].
      John: … I’m being kept… I’m being kept alive by that [ICD], you know.

   The everyday cyborg gains a new identity as an “extraordinary” person. Others had less euphor-
ic experiences along with a more ambivalent relationship with the ICD. A few participants said
that the silhouette troubled them and Timothy disclosed to having never really got used to having
the ICD in his body. He related how “your body shouldn’t have a square lump like that…”.
   The integrity of the body has changed, and the alteration in bodily image and appearance
is now a new source of heightened attention for the everyday cyborg. The body is now at the
forefront of attention and reflection and in this way, the body is present, alienable and divisi-
ble. Indeed, in moments of stress or pain, the absence of our body ceases and the absence itself
now becomes absent. For Drew Leder, this is what he calls a primary absence as the body’s
absence in everyday life becomes very much a focal point; a “corporeal self-consciousness”
(Leder 1990, 98). Cyborgisation makes the body’s first and primary absence that is a feature
of routine living, absent or in Leder’s terms a “dys-appearance” (1990).
   When our “everyday absence” becomes absent then this is termed a “second order” absence
that Leder calls a “dys-appearance” (Leder 1990, 91). It might be simpler to conceptualise the
body as now having a presence, however, using Leder’s term “dys-appearance” of “absent ab-
sence” highlights that the body is usually absent in the first instance. As a concept, dys-appear-
ance necessarily contains within it therefore the importance of the body being a primary absence.
   Gradually, the device over time settles and sinks further into the chest as it becomes coated
with organic biomaterial. It becomes enmeshed into the viscera and Neil drew an interesting
analogy with this process and that of a ship:

      Neil: … was that when the device first goes in, it’s, kind of like, a, kind of… it’s more of a foreign
      body, if you like, to your… your system… and then once it had been in a long time, it, kind of…
      the wires and everything else that’s there, kind of, get covered in all the, sort of, gunk that goes
      round your body and it becomes less and less of a, kind of, foreign body over time, because
      it… you know… you know, I suppose like a ship in the sea, it gets covered… you know, like…
      Gill: Barnacles?
      Neil: … it gets covered in barnacles and all these type things…
Haddow, Åsberg and Timeto                                                                                   128

   Neil offers the ICD’s physical transformation as it gradually becomes coated in the “gunk”
of the organic body in the process becoming less “foreign”. This progression to a corporeal
structure is accompanied with a separate but related process of acceptance as part of the every-
day cyborg’s identity:

     Maggie: There’s… yeah, ‘cause as in, basically, if I was to try… if you think about it in the
     opposite sense, if something happens to my body, the wires… you know, the wires do some-
     thing. And it is, it’s part. So, of course, maybe in, like, fifteen years or ten years’ time, I will
     actually feel, you know, this is… it is part of me. And I suppose, in a way, maybe, you know,
     you might accept that it’s… it’s strange to think of accepting a piece of machinery that, sort
     of, is… (emphasis added).

   Growing comfortable to a hybrid techno-organic status and living with an ICD depends
on the everyday cyborg experiencing the ICD as “part of them” and also as a “benefit”. Stew-
art reported that his ICD was, “You know. It’s like my shoes. You know, I don’t consider my
shoes alien. I don’t, I mean it’s, obviously I wasn’t born with it, but it lets me be who I am”.
The ICD is part of the body’s image and integrity and has also become “part of” the everyday
cyborg’s identity. Stella had received a specialised ICD called a CRT-D to treat her heart fail-
ure and is a device that is implanted with an additional wire to go round the back of the heart
to co-ordinate a more efficient heartbeat. She told me that she “instantly felt the benefit from
it if I didn’t have it [ICD], I wouldn’t be able to breathe, you know”. She readily suggested,
“it’s just part of me now, it’s no big deal” (emphasis added).
   “Part of me” along with the enmeshment of the device are processes that are part of a more
general acclimatisation progression. With the ICD gradually becoming bodily enmeshed and
accepted as a benefit it is also no longer seen as a threat. Indeed, Lucie Dalbert’s research
findings suggest there is an acclimatisation or incorporation process necessary to adjust to
living with a deep brain stimulator (2015). This is based on the individual’s acceptance of the
technology as being a positive development and “part of them” (Dalibert 2015).
   Those around the everyday cyborg can also view the ICD as a benefit because it removes
some of their responsibilities of vigilance and over-sight they may have had before the cybor-
gisation process and over the everyday cyborg:

     Stewart’s wife: … when he [husband Stewart] was very ill I was concerned because you’d
     go to bed at night, this was before he had his ICD put in, we’d go to bed at night and I’m
     listening to his breathing because sometimes… it sounded as though he was going to stop.
     And then I thought, “oh God, something’s going on” and then he would breathe again. So,
     I really was, he was totally unaware of that because he was asleep… So that I was very keen
     for him to have an ICD because I thought, well at least if I’m asleep and he stops breathing
     or whatever then something’s going to happen to, to save him.

  The ICD can protect the everyday cyborg from a SCA, allowing family and friends to step
back from such oversight.
129                                                                           Tecnoscienza. 2023. 14(1)

  3.2 Seeking control over a cybernetic technology

   The second vulnerability stems from the capacity of the ICD to deliver a series of increasing
powerful electric shocks in order to prevent a sudden cardiac arrest (SCA) in those thought
at risk from having one, or who might have already experienced one but in the process poten-
tially physically compromising the everyday cyborg.
   If the ICD performs its life saving function and discharges shocks, the event is explained retro-
spectively by most everyday cyborgs locating their actions as the reason for the discharge. Strat-
egies used such as blaming themselves through emphasising excesses on their part or indeed the
device misfiring (for example, if the parameters for shocks are set too low; the leads have broken;
or the ICD has mis-sensed). Steven’s ICD discharged a shock which he explained as: “Well… it
went off once, but that was my own fault… I was trying to lift something awfully heavy”. Timo-
thy explained the shock he received from his ICD was due to his tendency to worry:

      Timothy: I’ve said about I’m a worrier, so maybe that has got something to do with it…
      Even now, that last time, beginning of last year, that was when I had one or two incidents…
      there was worry then, there was a bit of panic then even when the incident happened, shak-
      ing and a right, they [clinicians] said a kind of panic attack, as well as something happening
      and that didn’t help it any.

  The process of acclimatisation in this regard amounts to the everyday cyborg offering ex-
planations for the ICD’s emission by placing themselves as an agent of the activity rather than
the recipient. Even being a “worrier” asserts some control over the device rather than acknowl-
edging that they are in control of the device. As Jackson says such strategies make us, “authors
of meaning rather than victims of circumstance” (Jackson 2002). Informal discussions with
cardiologists suggest that within reason, there is little or no relationship between what could
be termed the ordinary activity of the everyday cyborg and the ICD discharging shocks.


4. Discussion: Becoming and Being Cyborg

  Becoming a cyborg in the everyday means that for some individuals there is collateral dam-
age; vulnerabilities created, skin cut and changed, body integrity breached; viscera compro-
mised, relationships reformed, subjectivities altered. The construction of identity is a process,
for example, that is often disrupted by illness (Charmaz 1987) but also more recently by tech-
noscience innovations such as cyborgisation (Sulik 2011). The everyday cyborg becomes at
times more vulnerable in a new techno-organic hybrid configuration. Cyborgisation, alters
materiality and affects subjectivity creating a need for individuals to undertake the successful
acclimatisation process involved in becoming and being cyborg. This occurs in the cyborgi-
sation process when embodiment as a techno-organic hybrid is created at implantation and
further affected by possible activation. In these moments the body is no longer experienced as
an absence and comes to occupy the forefront of the everyday cyborg’s attention.
  Significantly, how human beings are embodied, that is the relationship between identity
Haddow, Åsberg and Timeto                                                                   130

and body (whether a person is a body or has a body) also is dynamic with a dys-appearance
caused by early cyborgisation becoming co-existent with having a body as a separate aliena-
ble entity. Acclimatisation, however, may bring a more settled and integrative embodiment
experience with the everyday cyborg becoming more likely to return to the holistic view of
embodiment and the ICD as becoming part of them. Then having or being a body is not a
static state, but a fluid experience of embodiment that is often ambiguous. I suggest that the
ambiguity is not just in terms of whether I am or I have a body, but its fluidity is based on
events that bring about questions of when I am or I have a body. This stems from the braided
processes of the implantation of the ICD that can create challenging alterations in embodi-
ment and living with the ICD activation means reinserting narratives of control.
   Being an everyday cyborg is a fluid experience of “dys-appearance” – of being aware and fo-
cused on embodiment as a techno-organic hybrid after implantation and post activation, and
then of this status becoming an absence – as the everyday cyborg acclimatises returning to
their living life with a heart device (Leder 1990; Sobchack 2010). The intimacy between tech-
nology and organism in the everyday cyborg’s body has a unique rehumanising effect; one
that makes them possibly ever more vulnerable. The ICD has a bodily intimacy that then cre-
ates a paradox: it is inside the body and almost inseparable to it whilst simultaneously being
the furthest away and out of the control of the everyday cyborg. For the everyday cyborgs, it
is the paradox of intimacy that is created as the cybernetic device within the body also creates
distance (as it cannot be reached by them) and a lack of control (as its functioning cannot be
altered by the everyday cyborg either). Then re-appropriating the term cyborg for our every-
day application reinserts issues about what cyborgs actually need to live happy and fulfilling
lives; what kind of support they and their significant others might find useful as well as what
type of information and understanding is required to acclimatise to a new techno-organic
hybridity. If there is a need to understand and empower those with varying abilities such as
everyday cyborgs, then there may also be a moral and political requirement to recognise and
even celebrate the hybridity of the materially diverse individual.
   The increasing reliance on techno-scientific processes such as implantable cybernetic de-
vices is an example of a much wider process that has been described as “biomedicalization”; a
state that is different to but is sprung from medicalisation when medical jurisdiction controls
an ever-increasing area of social lives. Biomedicalisation refers to, “the increasingly complex,
multisited, multidirectional processes of medicalization that today are being reconstituted
through the emergent social forms and practices of a highly and increasingly techno-scientif-
ic biomedicine” (Clarke et al. 2003, 162). Inspired by Illich’s medical nemesis (Illich 2003),
whereby medicalisation is the treatment for the diseases that medicalisation itself creates, so
by extension are technological and cybernetic fixes the “biomedical nemesis” of biomedical-
isation? Cyborgisation as part of the biomedicalisation process can produce its own unique
forms of iatrogenesis because of the vulnerable re-humanisation it creates and the strategies
that are demanded consequently.
131                                                                                Tecnoscienza. 2023. 14(1)

Acknowledgments

  I would like to extend my sincere thanks to the Tecnoscienza editors for their feedback, patience and sup-
port, the Wellcome for funding this research and to the “everyday cyborgs” for sharing their experiences.



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Cyborg Troubles: The Promises of Posthumanities
Cecilia Åsberg

1. Introduction

   We live in troubling times in need of multiple approaches and versatile research. The cli-
mate crisis is no longer a future prospect but unfolding before our very eyes. The most vulner-
able peoples, those of racialized and feminized poverty and a long legacy of exploitation in the
Global South, are invariably hit the hardest. In addition, we see also a resurgence of white na-
tionalism, right-wing populism, and new ways of warfare. We bear witness to a new world-en-
gaging war in Europe, in Ukraine. We face energy crises and environmental problems, such
as oil spills, harmful toxins, gas leaks and warming oceans. The global Covid-19 pandemic
recedes with looming threats of new multispecies contagions appearing. The troubles of the
world respect few boundaries. Amid these nested crises, our news, information, knowledge
and social media channels provide angles and perspectives in ways that often reflect back to us
our all too narrow preferences and world views. They mirror and exaggerate our own limited
sense of self in world full of rampant individualism, even grandiose narcissism (Casale and
Banchi 2020). Boundary crossings of all kinds define the present.
   In a struggling world, riddled with nested crises and societal challenges, Donna J. Hara-
way’s ground-breaking re-appropriation of the figure of the cyborg from the 1980s remind
me that proficient modes of addressing complex worlding problems have been developed be-
133                                                                        Tecnoscienza. 2023. 14(1)

fore and remains available to us as forms of cyborg knowing. In what follows, I will try to
unravel some of the conceptual threads central to Donna Haraway’s notion of the cyborg.
   It is a well-known story by now in STS, how the cyborg challenges hierarchical dualisms
and oppositions between organism and machine, nature and culture, body and technology,
female and male, human and nonhuman, imagination and material reality (Balsamo 1996;
Franklin 2006; Åsberg 2007; Åsberg and Lykke 2010; Oudshoorn 2020; 2021). It induced
a performative playfulness with serious political issues that rubbed off in scholarship, made
waves. Haraway’s cyborg heralded the ontological turn of critical posthumanism and (femi-
nist) new materialisms of all kinds. It did so without giving up on, instead harnessing, previ-
ous insights from social constructionism, Marxism, anti-colonial feminisms, cultural semiot-
ics, and the humanities. The cyborg signals to me the needed re-invention of the humanities
and social sciences so to re-imagine culture, society, and human identity in ecological and
technological terms. Various kinds of what we may call cyborg knowing flourishes in fact to-
day, under several academic banners and names. It thrives as an attitude of “staying with the
trouble” (Haraway 2016a; 2016b), a “double vision” (Haraway 1991) to the ambivalences of
the integrative political ecologies and technologies of the now.
   Haraway’s cyborg stands for a processual “natureculture” ontology, but also for an incen-
tive to boldly re-organize ways of knowing that make us accountable. A case in point in this
paper is the feminist posthumanities, relentlessly postdisciplinary research in and beyond
STS, that bring art and science to interdisciplinary humanities and more-than-human femi-
nisms to people. My aim here is to trace and revisit cyborg knowing for what onto-epistemo-
logical approaches it may have enabled in research, to map out the more-than-human, less
academic perhaps, and more humane promises of cyborgs today.


2. Enter cyborg

   Basically, the cyborg is a great pedagogical starting point for students of history of science and
technology, feminist, queer and anti-colonial theory and gender studies, social studies of med-
icine, media and technocultural research at large. In my years of cross-faculty teaching at a few
Scandinavian and north European universities, it has worked surprisingly well also for students
of biology, engineering, design, new media, sustainability science and nursing. It invites discus-
sions on ontology, epistemology, (breaks with) Euromodern history and theories of subjectivity
and subjectivation, ethics, power and resistance in the “matrix of domination” (Collins 1990).
   Especially so if we read Haraway’s “A Cyborg Manifesto” (as ontology) alongside “Situated
Knowledges” (as epistemology), as we tend to do. Published in 1985 for Socialist Review, the
cyborg manifesto grew into a prophetic meditation on how cybernetics and digital technologies
changed everything – from how we do gender to how we connect across the globe. A social media
influencer in Stockholm today uses a phone assembled in China with rare earth minerals extract-
ed in Congo to access a platform moderated by Filipinas and line pockets in Silicon Valley. New
technologies of affiliation, exploitation and solidarity break and re-draw boundaries of all kinds.
   Haraway’s second most influential essay, on situated knowledge, appeared a few years lat-
er and provide an epistemology to the cyborg’s ontology. To Haraway, knowledge is always
Haddow, Åsberg and Timeto                                                                        134

situated, environed and embodied in a particular geopolitical, historical, instrumental and
“naturecultural” context. It is limited and purposeful, a way of storying exposure.
   Both texts, making up “cyborg knowing” here, appear in Haraway’s widely translated 1991
book, Simians, Cyborg and Women, with the under-appreciated subtitle The Re-Invention
of Nature. I read it as indicative of Haraway’s attempt at finding common ground across
the arts and sciences in a postnatural world. Haraway’s writing and conceptual work seems
largely forged, as she states, “inside worlds at war” (2004, 2). She was born after World War
II, and wrote amidst the Cold War, the Science Wars, the war on terrorism, and the ongoing
conservative Culture Wars in the USA.
   “These worlds at war are the belly of the monster from which I have tried to write into a
more vivid reality a kin group of feminist figures” (ibid.), Haraway writes to contextualise her
kennel of cyborg kin concepts. Cyborg knowing may, in such a situation, create common
ground for how to deal with how old dreams of a common language built on disciplinary
nostalgia, modern categories and ideals of purity.
   In a research project on creative AI and the artistic imaginary, we have in my group a subpro-
ject on AI image generators, like MidJourney, DALL-E 2 or Stable Diffusion (Jääskeläinen et al.
2022). We look at creative AI in music, dance and image-generation for how it transforms the
craft and shift power. Visual AI enable a complete reimagination of the all too humanistic image
of gender, race, and human (species) individualism expressed at the locus of the face (Barthes 2007).
   AI for facial analysis, a technology of recognition, is a common application on most mobile
phones. Society enfolds already today on these technologies for securitization and surveil-
lance of borders of all kinds. Face shape, features, skin colour, movements and make-up are
captured, analysed, and compared and matched with classifications (in terms of gender, race,
scars, geometry and even inferring sexual orientation) against databases (Kosinski and Wang
2018). AI is also generative technology for creating images of faces and individuals (people,
but also cats and horses) never to have existed1. Even more so as generated AI art, where new
imagery is produced by textual prompts. Such creative AI really puts our common technolog-
ical imaginary and visual culture to the test of stereotypes.
   Cyborg knowing enables us to critique this visual culture as a digital dream of a common lan-
guage. These AI image generators (e.g., Figure 1) routinely display systematic intersections of
sexist, racial and heteronormative bias by way of design, prompts, and the stock photo of art and
imagery already existing for the training of machine learning systems in the vast online world.
Unsurprisingly, we get back from the systems the exaggerated and distorted mirror images of
humanity that we put into it. To paraphrase Haraway (1991, 154), the cyborg world of global
satellite surveillance, google maps, CCTV, facial recognition technology, AI-generated visuals
and video (often revenge porn), and algorithmic bias is about “the final imposition of a grid of
control on the planet”, about territory, war and “the final appropriation of women’s bodies”.
                                                                                                                       12
135                                                                                                      Tecnoscienza. 2023. 14(1)




                                                                Figure
                Image 1 – Gendering and racializing parameters in        1. an example of facing AI art, generated by Petra
                                                                  ArtBreeder,
                Jääskeläinen (KTH).
                           Gendering and racializing parameters in ArtBreeder,
                                 an example of facing AI art, generated by
          From another perspecXve, it is alsoPetra
                                              aboutJääskeläinen
                                                    embodied and(KTH).
                                                                 lived social realiXes in which people are not
       afraid of neither “their joint kinship with animals and machines”, not of their “permanently parXal
       idenXXes and contradictory standpoints” (ibid). Overtly sexist and racist rendiXons of our visual culture
       and self-image shape our sense of self as we reach out an extended arm for a cat-ﬁlter selﬁe to post.
  From In
       another    perspective,
          one sense                it iscreaXvely
                     we then also play   also about
                                                  with embodied     and
                                                       stereotypes and     lived social
                                                                        expressions       realities
                                                                                     of gender,      in species
                                                                                                art and  which people
       kinship, moulding a re-engendered cyborg imaginary.
are not afraid of neither “their joint kinship with animals and machines”, not of their “perma-
nently partial identities and contradictory standpoints” (ibid.). Overtly sexist and racist rendi-
tions of our visual culture and self-image shape our sense of self as we reach out an extended
arm for aCyborg
          cat-filter selfie
                knowing     toenough
                        is not post. In one sense we then also play creatively with stereotypes and
expressions of gender, art and species kinship, moulding a re-engendered cyborg imaginary.
          Cyborg knowing is about assuming there are more things going on than we could ever imagine, about
          unlearning old categories of thought and invenXng new epistemic pracXces based on modesty,
          parXality and a generosity of co-existence.
3. Cyborg   knowing
      Most importantly,    is not
                        cyborg       enough
                               knowing invokes an ontological feeling of connecXvity. A feeling that,
        “nothing comes without its world”, in the words of Haraway (1997) and Maria Puig de La Bellacasa
        (2012). To some, this is a methodological invitaXon to embrace an ethics of connecXvity. To others,
  Cyborg    knowing is about assuming there are more things going on than we could ever
        this feeling is one of a daunXng verXgo as it requires great responsibility on the part of us as readers,
imagine,researchers,
          about unlearning
                       students andold  categories of Also,
                                     knowledge-brokers.   thought      andassumes
                                                                it always   inventing      new epistemic
                                                                                     our complicity  in what wepractices
based oncriXque.
          modesty, partiality and a generosity of co-existence.
   Most importantly, cyborg knowing invokes an ontological feeling of connectivity. A feeling
that, “nothing comes without its world”, in the words of Haraway (1997) and Maria Puig
de La Bellacasa (2012). To some, this is a methodological invitation to embrace an ethics of
connectivity. To others, this feeling is one of a daunting vertigo as it requires great responsi-
bility on the part of us as readers, researchers, students and knowledge-brokers. Also, it always
assumes our complicity in what we critique.
   This cyborg connectivity means that knowing is inconceivable without the multitude of
relations that make thinking and knowing possible inside nested crises. It means that knowl-
Haddow, Åsberg and Timeto                                                                           136

edge is physically situated, embodied and embedded in locations, instruments, bodies and
concepts, as well as in rhetorics and story-telling devices, and, that objective truth always re-
mains partial and limited but good to have, in heaps, for greater sociability. To Haraway, pro-
gress in knowledge is not a bad word but the hard and modest, scientific way of life (Haraway
2004, 4; 1997). Knowing is social and imaginative practice, and it co-creates the surrounding
world – enables a practice of worlding and re-worlding. As such (as a feminist materialism
in the American pragmatist tradition), it borrows from social constructionism (the strong
programme), from ANT (the nonhuman) and standpoint theory but refuses representa-
tionalism. It makes for what Karen Barad (2003) later described as an onto-epistemology of
posthumanist performativity and agential realism. Nothing comes without its relational and
co-constitutive world, making political ecologies and technologies of how we are all biochem-
ical matter, and how we all matter, a core concern for research.
   A highly teachable principle of research permeates Haraway’s opus, from Primate Visions
(1989) to Staying with the Trouble (2016), that stories and matters of fact intermingle and
that it is daunting, but possible to trace this worlding analytically as a political implosion of
nested words and worlds (Dumit 2014).
   The works of Donna J. Haraway plays nicely with STS and feminist theory practices (1994),
with interdisciplinary humanities at large, and in this short piece I want to revisit and highlight Har-
away’s cyborg concept in the light of some contemporary knowledge practices. Not so much for
what it was, but for what it did and for what kind of postdisciplinary research it enables today (Lyk-
ke 2011). Our time is wide open to new conversations and new synergies of cyborg knowing, to
the exploration of alternatives for how our scientific communities are ordered (to echo Lucy Such-
man), to revisiting and re-tooling analytical toolboxes, and to new configurations of knowledge.

  3.1 Exit anthropocene, exit identity

   For those of us who has been committed to the intersections of feminist theorizing, cultural
studies, environmental justice and science and technology studies in the last decades, Haraway’s
work, and perhaps in particular her “Manifesto for Cyborgs” have simply been pivotal. To me,
“the cyborg” seems a bit like the concept of the Anthropocene now, also a term for the implosion
of nature and culture. The notion of the Anthropocene started its present career in geological and
climate sciences, coined in 1980 by ecologist Eugene Stormer and gained fame in 2000 when Nobel
laureate and Dutch chemist Paul Crutzen picked it up. In that sense, the Anthropocene and the cy-
borg generated new fields of research. They also generated unwarranted associations, at the risk of
losing critical salience as trendy buzzwords. I would like to turn this argument on its elitist head and
point to how important reverberant and irreverent concepts can be for collective thinking – from
the standpoint that there is no neutral or innocent way of seeing or knowing to begin with. There
are only starting points, conceptual portals, to collective learning, unlearning and re-learning.
   Initially, the Anthropocene question to stratigraphers concerned whether human develop-
ment had become a force on the planet to create a geological record, warranting a new name
for this all too human era (Zalaciewics et al. 2015). The term soon became heavily politicised
as it intermingled with climate change discussions (Steffen et al. 2011; Crist 2013). To some it
stimulated activism and provided a starting point for discussions on how to remodel society in
137                                                                          Tecnoscienza. 2023. 14(1)

emancipatory directions (Cuomo 2011; Klein 2015). To others it was not specific enough, even
misleading, and moving away from crucial concerns about social justice and capitalism’s re-
sponsibility for environmental changes (Crist 2013; Malm and Hornborg 2014; Moore 2013).
   Anthropocene, Capitalocene, Plantationcene, Wasteocene, Gaia, Chthulucene and the
Great Acceleration; there are many names for our global instability in academic circulation.
This richness in our collective terminology, is like Haraway’s “Chthulucene” all made up of
“ongoing multispecies stories and practices of becoming-with in times that remain at stake, in
precarious times, in which the world is not finished and the sky has not fallen – yet” (Haraway
2016b). To me this openness is the cyborg gift to postdisciplinary research like Environmen-
tal Humanities (Bird Rose et al. 2012; Neimanis et al. 2015; Åsberg 2018), and a chance to
get along together with some grace in our conversations. Like cyborg knowing, the Anthro-
pocene-variations, both risks to become a common language and of creating a new Master
narrative. It both ignites collective action, and risk spread fatalist despair and the illusion of
one single penultimate solution. What today might amass to Anthropocene social sciences,
environmental humanities and Anthropocene feminisms (Grusin 2016), take us as scholars
away from the romantic notion of finding one concept to describe it all. To paraphrase from
“Manifesto for Cyborgs”, our politics cannot be rooted in (humanistic) identification if we
are many things simultaneously, vanguard parties if we are part of mass-movements, purity
if we live in a postnatural and impure world, and mothering if we do not wish to reproduce
oedipal patterns of care as women’s business (Haraway 1991, 219).
   This giving up on identity, while insisting on the transferability of transformative insight from
knowing together on location, is a form of postdisciplinary “rooting and shifting” for the sake of
mobilising strategic alliances, to borrow a term from feminist political theorist Nira Yuval Da-
vis (1997). It started out as a concrete practice of “politica trasversale” amongst a feminist activist
group living in Bologna, Italy in the mid-1990s. They visited war-riven conflict zones to support
women in other countries, in a programme they called “Women Visiting Difficult Places” (Cock-
burn 1998). Like the cyborg concept, this transversal approach frees us from unproductive guilt
trips, and from the need to root politics in one single problem (capitalism, gender, legacies of em-
pire, technological or biological or ecological determinism) and steep it all in a dream of a common
language. Concepts that matter to us will do different jobs in different settings for different reasons.


4. Companion species

   Cyborg thinking changed a lot of scholarly discourse in the decades after the 1980s. The
connective cyborg is a prominent harbinger of the need to boldly work in interdisciplinary
collaborative contexts. It brings necessary feminist theory to STS and science to the humani-
ties by way of feminist cultural studies of science and technology. To me, the formative con-
vergences in Lykke and Braidotti (1996), Franklin, Lury and Stacey (2000), Bryld and Lykke
(2000), Alaimo (2010; 2016), and Grusin (2017), to reference a few studies, are exemplary
and highly educational ways of cyborg knowing. The rich work of Haraway has flourished
as practices – also in the neglected margins of the privileged North. In its wake, synergies
of ecofeminist ethics and queer cyborg knowing found new ground in eco-cultural studies
Haddow, Åsberg and Timeto                                                                           138

(Alaimo 1994) and later, in environmental humanities. Haraway’s “posthumanism” trans-
posed from (too bounded) cyborgs to the bio-ecologies of companion species.




                                              Figure 2.
                          By Askö Lab in the Baltic Sea, green slick algae,
                         bladderwrack, a cable and other traces of humans.
                                    Photo Askö island, 2017.


  At a fast pace, biodiversity loss, warming ocean waters and climate change bring new kinds
of exposure to the cold and far-away northern shores. Our society’s dependency on the com-
panion species of sea and coast are hard to fathom, ranging from the oxygen we breath and the
carbon sink work of algae (outmatching rainforests) to the food we eat. Algae, like algorithms,
are embedded everywhere in daily life, in the beer we drink or the gelato we lick. In a project
on arts at the edge of the sea, we attend to the companion species of the coast, using and devel-
oping marine science, blue humanities and art by the long-stretching Swedish coastlines (e.g.,
Figure 2). Kelp and bladderwrack, invasive Pacific oysters and salmons, crabs and mussels,
provide object-lessons for storying exposure (Åsberg et al. 2020; Åsberg 2020; 2023; Jue and
Weeks 2023). Rotting seagrass, waves, ebbs and flows, shells, plastic waste, abandoned fish
nets, flip flops, and other junk, even washed-up military waste from previous world wars, like
sea mines or dumped canisters of arsenic-laced mustard gas, make for a strange multispecies
community by the beach (Neimanis et al. 2017).
  The trans-corporeal ethics of companion species at sea:

     turns from the disembodied values and ideals of bounded individuals toward an attention
     to situated, evolving practices that have far-reaching and often unforeseen consequences for
     multiple peoples, species, and ecologies. (Alaimo 2008, 253)
139                                                                    Tecnoscienza. 2023. 14(1)

   It demands cyborg knowing, yet also so much more than critique – it demands the con-
structive creativity of more-than-cyborg legacies.
   Insisting on Adrienne Rich’s “politics of location” and Haraway’s “situated knowledges”,
cyborg knowing becomes a portal to understanding all kinds of embodied worldliness and to
the development of new modes of storying exposure. To this day, Haraway’s cyborg invites
critical adventures in exploring the technoscientific globalization of planet Earth, the com-
mon languages of algorithms, AI and the Anthropocene. My argument, or rather a sugges-
tion, is here that technoscience studies today need up-dated and ecologically situated cyborg
knowing for finding common ground and strategic alliances. Yet it will never work as a uni-
versal solution: cyborg knowing is more like an engine of discovery, putting things in new con-
stellation and new perspective, inviting re-conceptualization. For Haraway, as pointed out by
Grebowicz and Merrick (2013, 8), the “cyborg’s ‘global’ is not the philosopher’s ‘universal’”.
Instead, cyborg knowing refuses both relativism and totalism by an epistemic embeddedness
that takes both science studies and feminist theory far beyond any “standpoint”, “identity
politics”, singular focus on “gender”, on “place” or eco-romantic notion of the innocent local.


5. Posthuman in practice

   As argued, cyborg knowing thrives in feminist and queer theory practice (cf. Rosi Brai-
dotti, Jack Halberstam), in feminist post-, anti- and decolonial theory practice (cf. Gayatri
Spivak, Anna Tsing, Madina Tlostanova), in feminist eco-cultural studies (cf. Stacey Alaimo,
Myra Hird, Mette Bryld and Nina Lykke) and in feminist ethics (cf. Maria Puig de La Bellac-
asa) and of course in the reverse engineering of the humanities that goes on in feminist STS
by way of N. Kathrine Hayles, Lucy Suchman and Karen Barad.
   I would also like to claim that the socialist-feminist cyborg was a harbinger of the present
surge of feminist new materialisms and posthumanisms, but I may be kicking in already open
doors in that regard (Braidotti 2013; 2021; Åsberg and Braidotti 2018). Even if Haraway
herself denounced the posthuman (in favour of companion species) for the work needed of a
more inclusive humanism (Haraway 2006), she invited, what I would like to call the practices
of posthumanities (Åsberg 2009; 2021). Haraway’s cyborg heralded already such more-than-
human feminisms, ecologically, biologically, and technologically situated. In STS as in Gender
Studies, this implies a crucial shift in the feminist modes of attention towards other species,
the body and to biology as a scientific discipline of great transformative potential in society.
Following recent turns “towards relationality and the enacted nature of entity boundaries”
(Stacey and Suchman 2012, 24), even widely termed the posthuman term, the cyborg, I con-
clude, is an excellent starting point for mapping critical posthumanisms, for what they can
do, and how they congeal into epistemic communities and into wider knowledge ecologies
to re-invent how we do immersive research in society, as part of society, as part of the world.
   The work and life of Donna Haraway, passionately dedicated to both feminism and science,
especially biology in theory, has inspired thousands of people both inside and outside academia.
She is one of few feminists who have reached very diverse audiences and is cited and sighted at
both science and technology studies conferences, in cultural studies surroundings and in gender
Haddow, Åsberg and Timeto                                                                       140

studies classrooms. Modern society is entangled in complicated issues of life and healing, death
and suffering, of who gets to play and live, who gets to die, and who decides and profits from
that. The feminist views to the everyday cyborgs that Haraway proposed was a way of unpack-
ing and holding up for inspection all that. New configurations of knowledge ensue from that.
   Cyborg knowing, re-read across most of Haraway’s work (and many of her interlocutors, like
Bruno Latour, Rosi Braidotti and the rich and layered literatures beyond these stars) and most of
all, what it generated in feminist, cultural and STS research communities, I claim, produced an
important incentive. It produced the encouragement to respond with more humane (if feminist,
queer, crip and anti-racist/anti-colonial inclusions can be said to do that) and with a more-than-hu-
man humanities to the all too humanistic impact on ecologies, climate and socio-technical systems.
   Today, it has become quite clear to critical thinkers that there is nothing natural or given
about how we organize society (Åsberg 2017). That also technology, medicine and science
are, to use Bruno Latour’s paraphrase, politics by other means. This goes of course for in-
terdisciplinary research in arts, humanities and social sciences too. Following from this there
should be nothing natural or given about how we organise our research. In fact, in a world
so easily at war there is nothing natural, at all, only the negotiated struggles and prospective
alliances with real effects and long-term exposures to peoples, species and environments. For
this, I think we need always to rethink how we organise our collective cyborg knowing.
   Last in this essay, I want to contend for exactly that kind of reorganisation of lively femi-
nist (critical/creative) research practices and research concepts with impure cyborg roots and
routes, between and beyond the disciplines. Research that can help us inhabit the re-inven-
tion of nature, and of culture. We need the generative reconfiguration of critical concepts
and configurations for situated knowledges. You see, I think we need research that can be as
responsive to change as the world which it purports to critique.
   The cyborg was already for Haraway much more than a metaphor for the joint merging of
biology and technology. It collected ideological dreams, fractured identities, borderlands and
conflict zones of many kinds, like the bridging of the human species body and other biologi-
cal organisms, technoscience and society, the virtual and the real (Haraway 1991). It was one
possible figuration, an imploded node of fact and fiction, embodied and embedded in the
networks of technoscience. An implosion, in contrast to an explosion, concentrates matters.
Haraway’s cyborg was one such implosion of entangled cultural meaning and materiality
with socialist feminist Cold War urgency. She picked out critical threads out of that over-de-
termined, imploded figure (from the contemporary NASA-imaginary) and she re-read the
cyborg as a political myth, an ironic parable of processes already embodied and set in motion
that not necessarily have to end badly.
   The cyborg has potentials still as a reconfiguration of knowledges. A metaphor for modern
technoscience, cyborgs points to the collapsing of nature and culture into each other, for sure.
Haraway saw the same collapsing of the soft and hard sciences, hard and soft societal powers
of subjectivation, making the cyborg a figure of interdisciplinary alliances and non-innocent,
temporary identity in a world dividing and connecting in new ways. If Euromodern-type
dichotomous thinking about nature and culture, according to Haraway was impossible to
uphold in the new world order, then other feminist dichotomies like sex/gender would also
be problematized along with the cyborg. The cyborg functioned as a research portal to the
141                                                                    Tecnoscienza. 2023. 14(1)

more-than-human ecologies and technologies of contemporary posthumanities.
   Over the last decade of academic activism, I have come to term such efforts feminist post-
humanities (Åsberg 2009b; 2020). Not because we are over the humanities, but because we
need it in thicker registers (Lyotard 1991). Such research practices need to move us, motivate
us and be move-able across boundaries. In some sense, this entails perhaps the reimagining
of feminist technoscience scholarship in more open-ended, less disciplinary, and in more-or
less-than-human inventories. To me, feminist practices of posthumanities acts like situated
cyborg knowing and prepares the ground for ulterior sets of minor research ecologies that may
or may not traverse the academic boundaries. After all, the cyborg world respects no academic
disciplines – only emergence of whatever may be, and we are, more often than not, surprised
of the turns taken. Feminist posthumanities as cyborg knowing defies fatalism and determin-
isms of all kinds. It is not a practice of DIY, but a DIT – do it together.
   This type of research practices ventures outside the ivory towers, join hands with activ-
ists, artist, science journalists and change-makers of the world. Examples of this collaborative
practice are, for instance, the co-op of the UN Ocean Decade’s transnational art and outreach
project We Are Ocean with my research group The Posthumanities Hub (see Figure 3), or
how art centres (Bonniers, Färgfabriken in Stockholm) or Sweden’s Historical Museums are
co-funding exhibitions, postdocs and doctoral-employments with the Hub; or how a upper
secondary school class in a Stockholm suburb along with youth art activists (“Squid Squad”)
in rural Gnesta supported with their work and commitment one of our environmental com-
munication projects (“Reclaiming Futures, Storying Change”). These are some recent exam-
ples of co-operations and jointly envisioned projects, some successfully funded by research
councils, some not. But they all give added value to the cyborg knowing I teach and practice
at the virtual, multiversity platform and cyborg lab, The Posthumanities Hub.




                                           Figure 3.
                               Banner of The Posthumanities Hub.
Haddow, Åsberg and Timeto                                                                               142

Acknowledgements

   My gratitude goes out to science journalist and science communication’s researcher, Lotten Wiklund
– a longstanding member of The Posthumanities Hub, for helping me shorten this piece. But also, to the
editors of Tecnoscienza, to Barbara Morsello, Attila Bruni and team, for their patience. To WASP-HS pro-
ject “AI and the artistic imaginary” and the image-work of Petra Jääskeläinen (PhD-student at KTH), to
FORMAS project “Reclaiming Futures”, and to all Hub co-researchers across projects on land and sea.



Notes
  1
   See facial image generators, such as: https://this-person-does-not-exist.com/en (see The Research
Nest 2020).



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Cyberzoa: Refiguring the Ecology of the Cyborg
Federica Timeto


1. From cyborgs to cyberzoa

   This paper sketches out some possible directions for developing a theory of cyberzoa –
animal-machine configurations of human and nonhuman animal lives – that prioritize the
ecological aspects already present in the feminist cyborg figuration and take into account the
more recent debates on the convergence of multispecies ecologies and technologies in the
humanities and the social sciences.
   This multispecies perspective responds to the call to address the zoological connection
(Bryant 1979) in the social sciences and applies it in Technoscience Studies. In technoscience,
“human and nonhuman actors […] are brought into alliance by […] material, social and se-
miotic technologies” (Haraway 1997, 50). Even if the feminist cyborg includes nonhuman
animals in its definition, and non-feminist cyborg theory relies on animals as models, in both
cases, the zoa [Greek: zώα] in the cyborg seem to have faded into the background. However,
cyborgs are “constitutively full of multiscalar, multitemporal, multimaterial critters of both
living and nonliving persuasions. Cyborgs matter in terrain worlding” (Haraway 2016, 105),
and this worlding is what all zoa make possible.
   Zoa means animals in Greek and is currently used to compose many terms referring to
the animal kingdom; although the latter obviously also includes human animals, their so-
cial life has nevertheless been distinguished – and used to distinguish human beings – from
“bare life” in the Western tradition, being thus defined with the term bios as opposed to zoé.
Zoa were members of nature as opposed to (because without) culture, therefore also without
technology (Agamben 2004; Braidotti 2019). Arguing for a multispecies, deeply ecological
redefinition of the cyborg, the use of the term cyberzoa is hereby proposed to refer to ani-
mal-machine configurations including, and paying attention to, both human and nonhuman
animal lives and their flourishing, following the consideration of a natureculture continuum
Haddow, Åsberg and Timeto                                                                   146

(Haraway 2016) that profoundly undermines the exceptionalism/exemptionalism of the hu-
man species (Catton and Dunlap 1980).
   Cyberzoa require that we consider extended, multispecies technosocial alliances, as well
as whom they benefit and why, and that we do not see technosocial agentivity as merely a
human property or capability. Apart from in “exceptional” situations (from Koko the gorilla
using a computer to primates on social media taking selfies), unfortunately today nonhuman
animals become-with machines mostly – if not exclusively – when they become machines
since an active, creative, socially empowering encounter with technologies is still a human
prerogative. Let us think about “smart” livestock farming, for instance, whose aim is com-
plete control over the animal’s “enhanced” body for optimizing production. Given that the
cyborg world that Haraway imagines in the first manifesto (Haraway 1991a) is one in which
“people are not afraid of their joint kinship with animals and machines” (ibid., 154), can a
world be envisioned in which other living actors in cyberzoa live their technosocial relations
without being afraid of their joint kinship with human animals and machines? After all,
“[t]he animals make demands on the humans and their technologies to precisely the same
degree that the humans make demands on the animals” (Haraway 2008, 263).


2. The current debate on the encounter of ecology and technology

   The multispecies societies in which we live, including both human and nonhuman actors,
are articulated through complex ecosystems in which biology and technology increasingly re-
define themselves and each other. Life is not only seen as technological from its inception and
evolution but is also technologized in unprecedented ways, from the geolocalized apparatuses
and networks set up for animal husbandry, conservation projects, and warfare to biomimicry
and biorobotics. The fields of Digital Sociology, New Media theory, and the relatively new
field of Animal-Computer Interaction (ACI) are particularly interested in the convergence
between the living and the digital. Most often, however, such convergence continues to re-
volve around the human as the only species benefiting from it. It is only very recently, due to
the current environmental crises and the urgency of finding a different way of inhabiting the
world, that the need to reframe the relation between ecology and technology has resurfaced,
paving the way for an ecological re-turn to the cyborg: this implies a post-anthropocentric re-
orientation of both the theoretical interpretation and practical application of this figuration,
whose already existing ecological openings have been neglected for too long.
   Peters, Jandrić, and Hayes (2021), for example, discuss the “postdigital condition” and ad-
vance a critique of technological corporate “solutionism” that embraces the emergence of the
biodigital, that is the turn of the biological into the digital and vice versa. Even though the
authors understand the biodigital as necessary for the planet in terms of environmental en-
hancement and renewal, throughout their arguments their objective is sustainability for the
human species, which is in keeping with the One Health perspective. Although Peters, Jan-
drić, and Hayes acknowledge that we live in multispecies societies, they do not infer from this
that such enhancement and pervasive management of life, which also relies on an ecologically
inflected version of transhumanism, is not at all sustainable in multispecies terms.
147                                                                      Tecnoscienza. 2023. 14(1)

   In his most recent book, the new media theorist and digital artist James Bridle (2022) also dis-
cusses the postdigital condition, referring to many examples of the biodigital sphere. However,
many of the examples that Bridle considers take nature and its living beings as inspiration for
technological improvements, which, although more ecologically aware, still sees zoa as models
and humans as, if not the inventors, then the managers or recipients of such inventions. Anal-
ogously, research in the field of biomimicry, in which animal behaviors, organic substances,
and natural techniques are recreated in industrial applications, relies on the pluripotentiality
of life as the new “driving force of technological innovation” (Johnson and Goldstein 2015, 4)
without transforming the current technosocial infrastructure and its power asymmetries. On
the contrary, biomimicry even builds new enclosures under the guise of transgressing existing
boundaries, “customizing […] other species to human ends” (Salter 2015, 17).
   The digital sociologist Deborah Lupton takes a different position. Some years ago, she
wrote about digital data as companion species (Lupton 2016), following Haraway’s sugges-
tion that companion species are all those post-cyborg entities coevolving with humans, which
create lively, generative assemblages. More recently, Lupton (2023) has recognized that the cy-
borg figuration can provide the basis for a reconsideration of the emergent ontologies of what
we have called cyberzoa, even though she does not go so far as to formulate a critical cyborg
theory for the animals that assemble in cyberzoa. She instead describes how new technologies
contribute to human-animal relationships at a micro- and macro-political level: a series of
technological interventions more or less directly become part of such relationships – from
smart devices for datafying wildlife to the e-waste of technological corporations – and the
consequences of these configurations need to be carefully handled. Lupton also notes that
when the One Health perspective is adopted, the focus tends to be on risk prevention for
the human, with the consequence of further instrumentalizing the more-than-human. Some
examples include the Internet of Animals, when, for instance, insects are equipped with de-
vices for monitoring climate change, and the numerous projects in which animals that are
considered to be pests are geolocated in order to contain and control them.
   Trying to overcome the anthropocentrism of the One Health approach, Maya Livio and
Laura Devendorf (2022) have written about the “eco-technical interface” regarding “the in-
creasingly complex boundary between humans, the more-than-human world, and human-de-
signed technologies” (ibid., 1). They note that nonhuman lives are usually instrumentalized
by the pervasive embeddedness of technologies in the environment and cannot enjoy the pos-
sibilities reserved for humans as the only beneficiaries of the value that these new connections
produce. Although Haraway is not the primary source in Livio and Devendorf, the boundary
condition of the eco-technical interfaces that they describe can “facilitate or constrain rela-
tions” among all animals and machines just like the cyborg’s liberating or oppressing sides
(ibid., 2). They believe that foregrounding the eco-technical interface in design (see also Wes-
terlaken 2020) could be a way of avoiding the further instrumentalization of animals and,
at a minimum, providing greater awareness of nonhuman lives and their needs because the
difference between care and instrumentalization is easily blurred in cyberzoa.
   Among the fields of study focusing on the convergence of the living and the digital is the
new field of Animal-Computer Interaction (ACI). Expanding the field of Human-Comput-
er Interaction, ACI emerged “within a cultural climate in which old oppositions between
Haddow, Åsberg and Timeto                                                                    148

human agents and natural resources are being increasingly questioned” (Mancini 2017, 130),
and which considers animals as stakeholders for designing user-centered and possibly also
participatory technologies, ideally leading to designing technologies not only with but also
for animals. As Clara Mancini says, ACI deals with animal-computer interactions in the an-
imals’ contexts of belonging – be it a savannah, a factory farm or a medical laboratory. ACI
is oriented to designing technologies that improve “animals’ life expectancy and quality”
(Mancini 2011, 70), while also giving them control over the processes that involve them, to
minimize negative effects, avoid side effects, and improve interspecies communication. She
argues that ACI should always be aimed at animal welfare and autonomy and always obtain
their consent. But how can the principles of ACI be implemented in “environments” such as
factory farms where animals can never have autonomy because they are “kept” there without
being able to enjoy their Umwelt or experience a condition of well-being?
   There is an enormous difference between ACI’s ethical approach, which is aware of the ten-
sions posed by the asymmetries of existing species, and the promotion of smart farms as a guar-
antee for the consumer that they can freely access all possible data about the “product” (Jukan,
Masip-Bruin and Amla 2017). However, to deal with unanswered questions, ACI scholarship
could benefit from navigating the contradictions it encounters (Mancini, 2017) and looking
at the “contexts” that surround the design stage, in which cyberzoa are also configured and
technosocial relations take place. Perhaps it is not a matter of enabling animals “to make tech-
nology happen” (Mancini 2017, 133), but of enabling technologies to let animality happen.


3. Reconnecting ecology and technology within Feminist Technosci-
ence Studies
   Notwithstanding the multiple ecological openings offered by the feminist cyborg in Don-
na Haraway’s formulation, the ecological potentialities of this figuration have either been
ignored (Hables Gray, Figueroa-Sarriera and Mentor 1995, 2021; Kirkup et al. 2000) or have
not been sufficiently focused upon (Grebowicz and Merrick 2013) in most of these debates.
Although Feminist Science and Technology Studies have continued to interrogate the con-
stitutive practices of technoscience and their interspecies entanglements (Ferrari 2015), es-
pecially concerning biotechnologies, in general a residual humanism has characterized the
cyborg interpretation in recent decades. Whereas the figuration of the cyborg has provided
fertile ground for scholarship related to the posthuman turn – in fields ranging from philoso-
phy to the performing arts – its potential has unfortunately not gone so far as to erase residual
anthropocentrism. A misleading narrative also emerged about “the two Haraways”, separat-
ed by a presumed Harawayan turn starting from the second manifesto (Haraway 2003) and
culminating in her last book (Haraway 2016). Of course, we now read the cyborg in a differ-
ent historical moment, aware of the meanings of “companion species” (Haraway 2003) and
“compost society” (Haraway 2016). Nevertheless, many passages in Haraway’s work follow
the links between the ecological and technological (Haraway 2004b), which also serve not to
separate ecofeminism and technofeminism (Haraway 2004c).
   Stacy Alaimo (1994, 133) is the only researcher in feminist scholarship who has already
149                                                                              Tecnoscienza. 2023. 14(1)

attempted “to map out a feminist ecological position within and between the cyborg and
ecofeminist poles”. She notes how the blurring of the boundaries between women, nature
and other animals has frequently played on the side of patriarchy and technocracy rather than
benefiting the multiple subjects of feminism. The same risk is inherent in the cyborg: “Are
the pleasures of boundary confusion appealing enough to disengage a technophilic ideology
from a phallocentric politics of domination?” asks Alaimo (ibid., 148). On the one hand,
she warns against any acritical glorification of nature and “a conservative environmentalism”
(ibid., 137). On the other hand, she considers the figurations of the coyote as more “effective
agents for environmental politics” (ibid., 194) than the cyborg. Why the coyote? In some
traditions, particularly those of the Native Americans, the coyote plays an important role as
a trickster, whose goal is a reversal of the status quo (Timeto 2020). The coyote is a figure of
trouble, mingling, and transformation, which can never be taken under complete control.
For Haraway, nature is inappropriate/d like the coyote, and so should feminism, which in her
view should always escape identification as well as identitarianism (Haraway 1991a; 1992).
However, Haraway affirms that the coyote, just like the cyborg or the Oncomouse™, is not a
“natural” figuration at all, but is part of a queer family that does not depend on blood ties and
includes many other actor-networks falling between nature and culture (Haraway 2004a).
   Given the centrality of standpoint epistemology for feminist cyborg theory, it is also worth
considering the ecological expansion of situated epistemology formulated by Christina
Hughes and Celia Lury (2013), who propose a “thickening” of already existing trajectories
to encompass more-than-human lives, stressing the consequentiality of epistemological ap-
proaches and interventions. Hughes and Lury suggest:

      a re-ordering of the hierarchy of socio-material relationships in ways that dislodge the human
      from its apex; a refocusing of agency within practices, including methodological practices,
      rather than discourses; a returning to the politics of knowledge rather than that of identity; and
      a retooling of understandings of relationality and change. (Hughes and Lury 2013, 787-788)

   As they note, as many sides as actors are involved, which decentres the speciesism hierarchy
that privileges the human perspective and requires a multiplication and further decentring
of standpoints and their ecological reframing. This move is at the same time epistemological
(it makes room for multiple, beyond-the-human perspectives, and their performances), on-
tological (it dismantles essentialism and human exceptionalism), and political (it prioritizes
respectful practices based on the acknowledgement of constitutive relationalities). As Hara-
way writes, we must learn “to see together without claiming to be another” (Haraway 1991b,
193): cyborg epistemology is situated epistemology, which, not being a human prerogative,
makes it well-suited to becoming the epistemology of cyberzoa.
   Multispecies co-fabrication and the negotiation of reality at borders (including the borders
of disciplines), the asymmetry of partial connections, and the importance of taking sides are
some significant aspects of the ecological return to situatedness, as foregrounded by Hughes
and Lury based on what the cyborg figuration already makes possible.
Haddow, Åsberg and Timeto                                                                    150

4. Refiguring the actors in cyberzoa

   This section discusses the importance of considering the composition of heterogenous as-
semblages as one including humans and both machinic and animal nonhumans, drawing on
Haraway’s cyborg theory. Indeed, lives are always a matter of composition (Haraway 2008).
Both machinic and living things are and form compounds (ibid., 250), i.e., technosocial, na-
turecultural assemblages working through conjoined heterogeneous agents whose encounters
can have very different outcomes. Whereas, more recently, the post-posthuman figuration con-
densing this concept has become that of the compost (Haraway 2016), in the first manifesto
(Haraway 1991a) Haraway still privileges a computer vocabulary and rather focuses on inter-
faces: she discusses the “informatics of domination” of the “integrated circuit” restructuring
women’s lives “through the social relations of science and technology” (ibid., 165), and the
translation of bodies into codes in both communication technologies and biotechnologies.
   The feminist cyborg is an interfacial, historically situated figuration (Haraway 1997) im-
agined liberating the capacities of interfaced bodies and empowering rather than endangering
them. The cyborg stands at the interface between automatons and autonomy, nature and
culture, and the organic and inorganic. It engages in the interrogation and rearrangement of
the boundaries of human and nonhuman animals and machines, between them and within
them. What compounds, interfaces, and compost share, beyond differences in definition, is
the fact that humans lose their self-sufficient centrality and nonhuman animals are seen as
also endowed with a social agency in them.
   For the sake of our argument, it is worth considering an extended footnote in The Promises
of Monsters (1992, n. 14, 332), in which Haraway critiques Bruno Latour and what she calls
his “impoverished collectives”. This note comes at a point in the text in which Haraway elabo-
rates on the role that the objects of knowledge have in the processes of knowledge production
and the mutual, often unequal, structuring of all material-semiotic actors in these processes.
To better understand this controversy, it is helpful to consider what the essay more broadly
addresses. Here, Haraway explores what we mean for “nature”, foregrounding the continuity
of epistemology, ontology and politics like in A Cyborg Manifesto. Nature is not an essence
or a resource, and even if it can be a commonplace, a topos – which does not imply that it
is a textual object without material reality – it is never a given, but always artefactually done
by its heterogeneous actors, none of them in the position of mere resource, passive matter
or instrument. Articulating the representation of nature is thus necessary to avoid “distance
effects” and ventriloquisms and pay attention to these relations and implications in action.
   In the abovementioned note, Haraway agrees with Latour that the processes of artefactual
co-constitution of nature require “delegating competencies” (Haraway 1992, 298), as Latour
would put it. In the context of Actor-Network Theory, delegates refer to actors crucially
mediating other actors’ functions and actions, extending their technosocial networks. At the
same time, Haraway argues that the notion of delegates in Latour’s collectives needs to give
a proper account of the non-negligible component of such collectives. Cyborgs gather many
more actor-networks of technoscience (Haraway 2004c, 307) than Latour’s account foresees.
Thus, for Haraway, a sociology of technoscience solely considering machines and humans
with machines, is incomplete:
151                                                                         Tecnoscienza. 2023. 14(1)

      The interfaces that constitute the “collective” must include those between humans and arti-
      facts in the form of instruments and machines, a genuinely social landscape. But the inter-
      face between machines and other nonhumans, as well as the interface between humans and
      non-machine nonhumans, must also be counted in. Animals are fairly obvious actors […].
      (Haraway 1992, 332)

   The symmetrical consideration of machines and humans leads many Actor-Network the-
orists to forget that cyberzoa also include other animals. Furthermore, the fact that machines
perform social relations, and their inequalities requires that systems of exploitation and their
political implications are more explicitly addressed as a crucial component of the technical
content of science without the need to return to the social/technical binary (ivi; see also Wag-
man and Parks 2021). Feminist cyborg studies are aware that “metaphors matter” and “how
metaphors (are) matter” (Cowan and Rault 2022, 6). Machines perform sexism and racism,
and they also perform speciesism, i.e., the presumption that human beings are superior to
other living beings due solely to their species belonging. Speciesism weighs on how nonhu-
man animals connect with technologies, influencing whether they are equated with the ma-
chine pole or can be empowered by the connection like their human counterparts. It is thus
paramount to address the question of cyberzoa.
   These systems of domination already mark the story of the first cyborg created after a series
of experiments at the Rockland State Hospital in New York (Clynes and Kline 1995). These
took place in a cyberzoa configuration that involved many human and nonhuman actors,
including a rat, an osmotic pump, the scientists, and their institutional and commercial net-
works: Manfred Clynes and Nathan Kline used the rat as a model for understanding the
empowering effects of neuropharmacological implants on the human body (of the male as-
tronaut) launched in outer space. Specularly, Theseus, the mechanical mouse invented by
the computer scientist Claude Shannon in 1952, is a tiny zoo-robot able to orient in a maze
by trial and error, thanks to a series of relay switches located under the maze (one of the
first examples of machine learning), which served as a model for the behavioural psychologist
James Watson’s experiments on living mice that were sensorially deprived so that they could
behave like automata – that is, without autonomy (Timeto 2020). These are only two of the
many possible examples of cyberzoa in which asking who blurs the boundaries, from what
position, and for what reason matters, since not all partial bodies are equally positioned when
they enter technosocial connections, nor do they perform their existences in the same way. If
some can be empowered by these “fusions”, others may, on the contrary, be annihilated to the
point of “ontological collapse”, the expression that Zipporah Weisberg uses for the conflation
of transgenic animals and techno-economic apparatuses (Weisberg 2009, 41).


5. Conclusions: Towards a theory of cyberzoa

  Cyberzoa are multispecies (human and nonhuman) animal-machine configurations, and
the eco-techno-social relations that compose them come with multiple optics and position-
ings. Haraway’s works offer many openings for an environmental politics of cyberzoa with-
Haddow, Åsberg and Timeto                                                                     152

out the nostalgia for a lost Eden that seems to guide, for example, current experiments in
de-extinction. “Refiguring the actors” of technoscience (Haraway 1992, 297) is an essential
step towards the achievement of naturecultures that “ha[ve] many houses with many inhab-
itants which/who can refigure the earth” (ivi). Refiguring, though, means paying attention,
implies respecting and should lead to acting differently.
   Following these suggestions, this paper tried to envision some helpful starting points for a
theory of cyberzoa that draw on the ecological features already present in the feminist cyborg
figuration and take them beyond. To refigure the ecology of the cyborg and get rid of the re-
sidual anthropocentrism that the posthuman interpretation of the cyborg still retains: first, the
most often ignored boundary breakdown between the human and the nonhuman animal must
be included when discussing the interfacial condition of the cyborg, a starting point for an eco-
logical opening and employment of technoscience; second, the species performances of the ma-
chine should not be ignored. A cyborg theory for the animals goes beyond acknowledging that
nonhuman animals are part of the technosocial collectives in which we live together with ma-
chines and requires that theoretical and practical perspectives are reoriented in a post-anthropo-
centric, not solely posthuman, direction. Paying attention to nonhuman animals means being
aware that technosocial relations of cyberzoa perform inequalities and systems of exploitation
that call for a simultaneously situated and ecological consideration of “symmetry”, to reconnect
the onto-epistemology of the cyborg to its politics in an expanded eco-technical environment.
   Technosocial relations are performed in context, meaning that technologies are ecological
since they are used in specific ecologies and contribute to maintaining, altering, or co-creat-
ing them. If situated epistemology is the epistemology of the feminist cyborg, an ecological
situated epistemology (Hughes and Lury 2013) is well suited to become the epistemology of
cyberzoa. A theory of cyberzoa will need a politics of knowledge that considers how its mul-
tispecies actors are positioned, whom the extended technosocial relations of cyberzoa benefit,
and whether animals’ encounters with machines take place in ways that are active and em-
powering for them or lead to further instrumentalization.
   A theory of cyberzoa will question whether nonhuman animals can experience, in dif-
ferent moments of their involvement, from design to actual use, the same possibilities that
the cyborg potentially offers to human animals, that is, if such machines and assemblages
can work for the animals as well as being as, on and from them. Questions such as that of
Mancini (2017) on how animals experience a change in interaction with technologies should
be explored further, considering what kind of human-nonhuman relations are made possi-
ble through the mediation of technologies, for whom, and for what reasons, but without
overlooking the contexts. An investigation of unequal power relations and different social
relations is paramount: an ecological refiguration of the cyborg will start from here since no
optic comes without a positioning (Haraway 1991a). From a feminist cyborg perspective,
considering cyberzoa means paying attention to the inequalities and risks at stake, rather than
just the possibilities, which should be promising for all the lives involved.
153                                                                            Tecnoscienza. 2023. 14(1)

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Haddow, Åsberg and Timeto                                                                                  154

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