Cyborg Governance….
Paper for CongressCath Conference 2005
‘Virtuality and Indexicality’
Sunday 3rd July 2005
Panel 5: A Virtual Politics

Jonathan Paul Marshall
Research Fellow: Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences
University of Technology Sydney
jon.marshall@uts.edu.au
jmarshallau@yahoo.com

Room 416 Bon Marche Building
University of Technology Sydney
Broadway 2007
Australia

Cyborg Governance…

Abstract
The web of post-modern power appears nomadic, elusive and always elsewhere – in some ways more alive than ourselves.  Like our online presences, it has no obvious boundaries and appears as spirit-like, a magic life haunting the net and the world.  Being cyborg means being controlled, but the location of the control is never clear and always elsewhere.  Responsibility is distributed while the impact of power focused.  Power is seemingly emptied out of a place in order to allow that power to become total, as in Guantanamo Bay, where people are kept under US restriction but outside the presence of that country’s laws.  Government becomes liminal: ‘Liminal identities are neither here nor there, they are betwixt and between the positions assigned by law, custom and ceremonial’ to quote Victor Turner.  This liminality in the government and the corporation’s case, or in the systems case, is what allows it to govern strongly without resistance, even though the governance may feel like endless war.  It is suggested that focusing on contradiction, or oscillation is more productive than focusing on hybridity.  By not focusing on ambiguity or the bi-directional nature of indexes, models of becoming cyborg do not challenge distributed power.  

Introduction

This is the third in a series of papers taking seriously Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s idea that power is no longer confined to Nation State, or class, or any other single entity, but forms a complex dynamic network encompassing the world which they call “Empire”.  As the term Empire suggests an Emperor or a dominant State imposing its will, I prefer to call this configuration of power “distributed governance”, or “cyborg governance”.  

The first of these papers argued that distributed governance and the Internet are not inherently democratic, egalitarian or unauthoritarian.  Distributed governance can extend the power of dominant groups in a society, while making responsibility hard to allocate.  

The second paper suggested that Empire grew from the destruction of the participatory State, and began the argument that models of the cyborg feed harmoniously into maintaining distributed governance.  A characteristic of distributed power is that even the more powerful may feel alienated as, despite all efforts to render the system subservient, parts of it manage to escape, or obstruct. 

After some recapitulation, this essay discusses cyborg politics, and the course of cyborg war and work; implying war, and the politics of war, is everywhere.  Cyborg governance totalises through hybridity, and it is suggested that challenging boundaries is not always a subversive act.  Finally the essay explores how the index of cyborg relates to the virtual, and the index of the virtual relates to the cyborg, in ways which suck us into the system as parts or nodes.   

Negri, Hardt and Empire

‘Empire’ and ‘Multitude’ are the governing terms of Hardt and Negri’s discussion.  They write: 
Along with the global market and global circuits of production has emerged a global order, a new logic and structure of rule — in short, a new form of sovereignty.  Empire is the political subject that effectively regulates these global exchanges, the sovereign power that governs the world.  

Empire is not based upon Nations.  Empire is decentered and deterritorialised.  It exists in a world formed by information technology. ‘Empire takes form when language and communication, or really when immaterial labor and cooperation become the dominant force’.

Any easy objection is that under its current Administration the US may be attempting a more traditional Empire.  As Robert Steel writes: ‘Suddenly everyone has discovered, and accepts as a commonplace, that the United States possesses an empire’.  However, the US may already be overextended economically and possibly militarily.  This is a situation in which it is much easier to attack than to hold conquered territory.  Making dominance explicit in the world of distributed governance might make it more vulnerable, and we should not confuse dominance with domination. 

The term opposed to Empire is Multitude, which is defined as all those who labour and produce under capital, and it is asserted, inaccurately, that the differences which divide labour no longer exist.  The Multitude is the ‘class of productive singularities, the class of the operators of immaterial labour’.  This is an unfortunate definition as it excludes unproductive singularities and people who engage in “material labour”.  

Negri and Hardt give the power to the Multitude, writing that ‘the construction of Empire and its global networks is a response to the various struggles against the modern machines of power, and specifically to class struggle driven by the multitude’s desire for liberation. The multitude called Empire into being’.  Others might see the multitude being formed by the universalisation of mobile capital and the de-powering of labour.  It might be more useful to think of them as mutually arising if opposed.  There is always contestation everywhere once you start looking at power in terms of ratios, rather than in terms of a thing that someone possesses and other people do not.

This diffuse power, carried through wires, and command and control systems and virtually present force, is like our online presences.  It is not only either firmly present or absent, or even present and contested, but has no obvious boundaries and appears as spirit-like; a magic life haunting the net and the world, intangible other than when it strikes or is resisted.  Because of its unclarity, our reaction to it is an uncertain divination, rather than straightforward perception.  This power takes on a vague, undefinable life of its own - as Haraway states in a different context it is ‘disturbingly lively, and we ourselves frighteningly inert’.  Blending between cyborg and invisible power comes easily: ‘Modern machines are quintessentially microelectronic devices: they are everywhere and they are invisible’. 

In this condition it is not the victims, such as refugees or enemy combatants, who become liminal (they are confined to a specific place, under specific regulations, and very much outside), it is governance which becomes liminal.  As Turner writes, ‘Liminal identities are neither here nor there, they are betwixt and between the positions assigned by law, custom and ceremonial’.  Distributed governance seeps around us enmeshing us when we rebel.  This liminality does not build any communitarian communitas.  It is not ‘giving recognition to an essential and generic human bond’ but overcomes that recognition; breaking recognised bonds which seem threatening.  If it does create community then it does so against some other rather than through risking the participation of others.

Distributed power causes a problem for revolutionaries as the adversary seems to have disappeared and all Negri can council is withdrawal. Faced with the vagueness of distributed governance, we are to retreat away from others.  This exodus is also mentioned in their discussion of cyborg theory.

Radical Cyborgs

According to Haraway a ‘cyborg is a cybernetic organism, a hybrid of machine and organism, a creature of social reality as well as a creature of fiction’.  It wants ‘confusion of boundaries’, has ‘no truck with… seductions to organic wholeness’ and is ‘no longer structured by the polarity of public and private’.  The cyborg implies no difference between human and animal, natural and artificial, physical and non-physical.  It is ‘not afraid of… contradictory standpoints’.  ‘Who cyborgs will be is a radical question; the answers are a matter of survival’.  But whose survival is always an issue.

Hardt and Negri do not mention cyborgs often.  However, when they do it is under the rubric of the radical.  ‘Conventional norms of corporeal and sexual relations between and within genders are increasingly open to challenge and transformation. Bodies themselves transform and mutate to create new posthuman bodies’.  Referring to Haraway, they claim there are ‘no fixed and necessary boundaries between the human and the animal, the human and the machine, the male and the female, and so forth’.  They continue that: ‘Today’s corporeal mutations constitute an anthropological exodus… [which] is important primarily because here is where the positive, constructive face of the mutation begins to appear: an ontological mutation’.  However, not all ontological mutations need be beneficial, any more so than conventional genetic mutations.  ‘This creative evolution does not merely occupy any existing place, but rather invents a new place’.  

The Internet could be this new (virtual) place of exodus, although it is unclear how, if distributed governance is everywhere, this place can be external to it, or precisely what exodus achieves.  Perhaps it leaves the old places of land and State occupied by the already powerful?  Even when power is distributed, power struggles still occur in space and place.  The Nation State may not be independent of others, if it ever was, but it is not without effect.  Hardt and Negri are cautious, seeing the contradiction:
This notion of anthropological exodus is still very ambiguous, however, because its methods, hybridization and mutation, are themselves the very methods employed by imperial sovereignty.  In the dark world of cyberpunk fiction, for example, the freedom of self-fashioning is often indistinguishable from the powers of an all encompassing control.

But they then lapse into the idealism of a body that refuses to submit or adapt to the demands of Empire. 
Donna Haraway’s cyborg fable, which resides at the ambiguous boundary between human, animal, and machine, introduces us today, much more effectively than deconstruction, to these new terrains of possibility – but we should remember that this is a fable and nothing more.

The new world is supposed to allow ‘a total freedom of mixing and hybridizing, which makes it possible to express new feelings, different emotions.  And this in turn constructs new subjects… having neither boundaries nor fixed identities’.  

There is no forceful connection, through a theory of either psychology or subjectivity here.  Freedom of mixing might also produce reactionaries who enforce boundaries while seeking an essence demarcating them as a group, whether racial, religious, or political.  Negri recognises that the negative effects of hybridisation ‘are so great that we are frightened by our own capacity for creation’, but this problem is put aside by invoking the democracy of the multitude.

1968 or 1979?

Negri was heavily marked by the sixties and seventies, by the revolutionary and cooperative ventures of workers and intellectuals.  He is ‘one of those who think that 1968 brought about a new relationship between action and life’.  The intellectual can no longer be separated from the commons and the passions.  ‘Even capitalism became different’.  Power had ‘reigned over life’ by dividing life up ‘into work, emotions, the public, the private - in order to be conquered’.  In the sixties people began to unwind this by wanting everything by aiming at life in its entirety.  The ‘victory of the authorities... did not reaffirm the old system, but… profoundly modified it’.

This position is magnified, by his tendency to see cooperation of any kind as socialistic, hence globalisation bringing more cooperation is socialistic.  In the networks of production: 
the multitude itself produces the political organization of society. What the multitude produces is not just goods or services; the multitude also and most importantly produces cooperation, communication, forms of life and social relationships.  The economic production of the multitude in other words is not only a model for decision-making but also tends itself to become political decision-making.  

‘Levels of cooperation and sharing exist everywhere: even writing an article on a computer means having to rely on a common knowledge, which is to say the Internet’.  ‘[C]ontrary to what is believed, people have become more communist than before’.  Negri is excited by information economy theory and networking because he sees co-operation as communism in action.  This is as misguided as seeing all trade as evidence of capitalism.

However, the significant year for the contemporary world may not be 1968 and rebellions, but 1979 and the election of Margaret Thatcher.  This was followed in 1980 by the election of Ronald Reagan.  Both these latter events had lasting effects.  The destruction of the participatory state, deregulation of the corporate sector and re-regulation of the populace, promulgation of corporate markets and values, degradation of the welfare system, the shift of the tax burden from the wealthy, the decline of unions, the growth of the information economy, the break-up of the USSR, and the cultivation of the Taliban and Osama bin Laden.  All the forces dominating the Contemporary world come into play.  

We can see the “iron lady” and the media image president or the “programmed president” founder of the “Star Wars Project” as symbolising the birth of the cyborg and our subjection to cyborg governance.  Both Reagan and Thatcher were cyborgs, not just because Reagan can be seen as the product of an image machine – resembling Max Headroom – but because they both challenge boundaries.  Thatcher challenged the conventional borders of male and female, both challenged the borders between machine and human (not just as iron lady, but in seeing workers and machines as essentially the same, and workers as subject to regulation by “markets” rather than the other way around, and campaigning that corporate capitalism was of the people and that unions were not, a real confusion of borders), but because they ushered in an era in which boundaries between public and private interest were shattered – conflict of interest became a meaningless idea.  Claims of rolling back state interference lead to increased centralisation (removal of local schools, local police stations, local hospitals, local councils if possible) - just as level business organisations can increase central control and worker regulation.  Not interfering with people’s lives meant massive interference.  According to Thatcher, the Government should ‘seek to set standards by which people lead their lives’ without apparently bossing them around.  They could deny the existence of society which had obligations to the poor, while claiming mystical identity with their country.  Conservative social responsibility or noblesse oblige was jettisoned. Poverty was the fault of the poor.  Responsibility could be endlessly transferred or have no real meaning.  The buck never stopped anywhere.  Indeed, it circulated in truly massive speculative markets.

In keeping with cyborg expectations, the right exhibits surprising hybridity. It is apparently composed of free wheeling, independent individuals, seizing the momentary advantage, and upstanding, rooted, steady, moral family men.  They have successfully combined Christianity and the profit motive, and the long standing conservative critique of capitalism is so lost that most people don’t know it ever existed.  Maybe the combination of Christianity and capitalism is a hybrid so standard we don’t pause to think how strange it is.  However hybridising contradictions gives a powerful mode of argument, as Karl Popper suggested if you admit one contradiction then you can admit any argument whatsoever.

This “new” right disregarded the borders between truth and fiction or truth and hope.  Reagan would frequently confuse movies with reality.  Michael Rogin comments: ‘Reagan’s easy slippage between movies and reality is synechdochic for a political culture increasingly impervious to distinctions between fiction and history’.  Reporting a speech on Nicaragua, Rogin remarks ‘Reagan was soaring above the real. His maps, pictures, and visionary worldview exhibited on the television screen, replaced the world they claimed to represent’.  

Some claim the left has no appeal because its explanations no longer work.  It cannot, for example, explain racism.  Marx’s predictions about successful worker revolutions were wrong.  Whether or not this is correct, it would not worry the cyborg right.  They do not care if they can explain racism, or if their predictions are wrong.  The world can be remade to their image, with enough text, image, force and positioning, as is happening in Iraq.  Does it matter if there were weapons of mass destruction or not? Does it matter if there were almost no plans for the aftermath?  Does it matter if there is an ongoing guerrilla war with no end in sight?  Does it matter if there are demonstrations asking the occupiers to leave?  Does it matter if taxpayer’s money disappears by the hundreds of millions into the maws of the corporate sector?  

If boundaries of meaning shifted then, for these cyborgs, there are also no boundaries between nature and technology.  According to Reagan, forests produced more greenhouse gas than de-forestation, burning leaves more pollution than automobiles.  Reagan also challenged boundaries between nation states – not just in Latin America (Grenada, etc.) – but by helping the spread of acid rain into Canada.  
In rejecting an era of limits, Reagan expressed a core conviction of the nation.  One of the reasons that he so easily and unwisely brushed aside dire predictions of scientists and environmentalists about acid rain or global warming was that he never accepted – indeed could not accept – that there are limitations imposed by nature on all people, even Americans.  Reagan believed with an unshakeable faith than some invention or technological breakthrough would inevitably provide new answers to problems that today seem insoluble.  “If there is one thing we are sure of, it is… that nothing is impossible, and that man is capable of improving his circumstances beyond what we are told is fact” he said..:.

In this view the world itself is cyborg, subject to technology.  Republican Newt Gingrich and futurist Alvin Toffler were relatively easy bed fellows.  Gingrich implied it was impossible to explain the Third wave info-tech world would be like to Second Wave industrial people – although Ronald Reagan apparently believed in it.  The future would not have big institutions such as unions and big government, and everything would be customer driven.  Gingritch uses information society cyborg theory to promote: social justice and democracy through internet connections and ‘open’ communication rather than through participation in the State; abolition of race and gender as problems by ignoring them in the virtual; ‘safe warfare’ through cyborgs and overwhelming technological dominance; denial of the ‘whole’ we call society; destruction of unions in the name of individual freedom; lack of history and memory; pastiche of messages; inequality arises from individual difference etc.  

Economically boundaries were stretched, or obliterated, in favour of Corporations.  Reagan ‘saw no distinction between regulations restraining economic competition and regulations designed to enforce laws protecting the environment or the health and safety of Americans… regulations for classifying hazardous waste, lowering air pollutants, licensing nuclear plants, and classifying and restricting possible carcinogens’.  Regulations and getting government off the backs of the people were usually removed ‘after closed hearings at which consumers had no say’.  While praising decentralisation and smallness, companies became financially bigger with fewer workers.  ‘The Reagan years have witnessed on of the greatest waves of mergers, takeovers and corporate restructurings in history, with the tally standing at more than 25,000 deals worth $2 trillion and still rising’.  The Corporation challenges boundaries internal and external, natural and artificial. 

Martin Wood, celebrates the cyborg as describing the contemporary manager:
if we attend to their boundaries, life in modern organisations resembles high tensive borderlands.. they are about multivocal inclusivity and continual crossing over… I want to tell of cross-colonisation and hybridisation, of interbeing and heterogeneity, of the possibility of being one thing or another.  Of a tolerance also for the unassimilable; of reciprocal connectivity that breaks down the dialectic of original unity - of the cyborg (1999: 93-4).  

Employee inventiveness is still harnessed to the post-fordist corporation, rather than to the producer.  Modern organisations ‘may more productively be recognised as interactive and unstable cyborg assemblages as borderlands were meeting paces were fiction and fact no longer enjoy any a priori distinction’.  These ‘new and “virtual” modes of organising... suppress mind/body, individual/community, social/technical dichotomies’.  Everything is suppressed in the name of the hybrid whole of the corporation.  ‘The individual manager becomes a cyborg, born at the interface of automation and autonomy’.  The corporation and workplace is nomadic; workers become replicants; labour, robotics; mind, AI ready to be plugged into other machines.

‘Old fashioned’ unionism and attempts by workers to organise has been made much harder and the legal right of corporations to dismiss workers or to pay them less has been increased.  Carrying out these actions is labelled “reform”.  Attacks on workers, and that includes most of us, are not class warfare - they are the adjustments to the reality of the market, management has no responsibility for this.  Claiming that they might have, is scorned as class warfare, and the success of the attacks is taken to show that class identity has lost its appeal to hybridity.  We are to be flexible to the demands of work, not the other way around.  The cyborg subject is intensely regulated as soon as it tries to organise and go against its “freedom to be disempowered”.  This is a total politics, immersed in IT reducing the Multitude to assemblages and production units.  We all do as we are told within the limits of our programs.  The cyborg, as disposable or an endlessly reprogrammable hybrid, becomes the end of fragmentary democracy.  We become “Robopaths”.

Although the multitude of workers seem displaced from any central role, it seems clear that they are appendages to some kind of program, which uses them for as long as they are not replaceable.  Being cyborg means being controlled, but the location of the control is never clear - it is not, for example, control by a class.  No responsibility is taken for group disempowerment, it is simply individual choice.  We might call this distributed responsibility.

Looking at the Events of September 11 there seems a similar avoidance of responsibility either in preventing the attack, or in exploring the causes of the attack.  Past US history is irrelevant to considerations of origins, the dedication of some of the bombers to their cause, or to what support it received in the rest of the world.  If some one suggests that US actions may have contributed to terrorist attacks, then that person is ‘anti-american’.  

The attack on Iraq is justified by false information which seems to have been deliberately cultivated by the administration, but it is not their fault or their responsibility.  Even if they acted wrongly and ‘misunderestimated’ resistance, and refused to count casualties, then they acted for the best and must be supported.  Normally if people announce before they have the opportunity to do something that they want to do that something, and when they have the opportunity to do it they do it, and they build up support for their doing it with information which is false or erroneous, it might be assumed that they did it with intent, but apparently not.  Cyborgs have no history.  Nothing they do has any bad effect.  Their own intentions are measured entirely by good subsequent events, while bad subsequent events result from the actions of other.

Boundaries are merged and broken.  Power is seemingly emptied out of a place in order to allow that power to be total.  In Guantanamo bay, people are kept under US restriction but outside the laws of the US and outside the Geneva Conventions.  This is liminal power.  In abu graib, prisoners were abused in full view of the troops wandering casually around them.  Yet it is not the responsibility of the army, or of the commander of the gaols, or of the intelligence operatives who implied this might be acceptable, or the administration which encouraged it. 

Australian Prime Minister John Howard never knows what is going on when it suits him, and responsibility is truly distributed (there’s no one to blame) – yet the impact is not distributed, it is quite focused.  The Australian Government claims it will not be blackmailed by refugees killing themselves, or dying at its hands or incarcerated in its hands.  If refugee children are imprisoned it is the fault of the parents.  Government is the victim not the refugees.  The government excised parts of Australia from its official control to excise the rights of refugees arriving there, allowing them to be incarcerated overseas, outside of the protection of Australian laws, but under our  custody.  The power of cyborg government acts by denying its power.  

Total War

The literature on IT and warfare is huge, so I’m narrowing to ‘Shock and Awe’, as that seems significant.  In their book proposing this idea to the United States’ National Defense University, Ullman and Wade emphasise the melding of the military and corporations to enable the best research and equipment, and write of diffuse control: 
The fundamental technology thrust for channeling this new American industrial base to support Rapid Dominance must be toward the control and management of everything that is significant to the operations bearing on the particular Area of Interest (AOI). And we mean everything!

This is totalising war, aiming at complete control of the environment, through a combination of systems, specification of the position of all machinery (including human), in real time, with communication signals being almost ‘ambient’ and enemy awareness (even of their own society) completely blanked or inaccurate.  ‘Deception, disinformation, and misinformation will become major elements of this systemic approach’.  As will AI and filters to process the vast quantities of data and get it to the right people.  This involves wearable ‘PCs, advanced human-computer interface (HCI) techniques (i.e., voice interfaces and those coming to define “virtual reality”)’ and ‘Robotic systems, or taskable machines’.  Troops really become cyborgs.  The cyborg returns to the military commercial complex it originated within.

Negri expresses some contradictions in attitude towards war and its place in his theory.  In the interviews with Anne Dufourmantelle, Negri states that ‘in Empire, war no longer exists – war is finished’ as each country, or at lest its elites, are integrated into the market.  Although this might suggest that countries not so integrated could be fair game.  After the war on Afghanistan, war on Iraq, threat of war on Iran, wars in Africa, ongoing war in Chechneya, wars between Israelis and Palestinians, constant tensions between North Korea and the US and between India and Pakistan, this seems an improbable theory.  To say the death of perhaps over 100,000 Iraqis and the maiming, wounding and crippling of unknown numbers of others, is a ‘police action’, or an ‘administrative problem concerning management of imperial space’ is renaming war in newspeak.

These wars and tensions are about boundaries, and blurring boundaries.  The US administration wants to stop terrorists penetrating its boundaries by killing them elsewhere, and thus extending, or blurring, its effective boundaries.  Later in the interview Negri talks of the struggles in Genoa between ‘anti-globalisation’ protesters and police as ‘war, or, more precisely, a low intensity war, combined with a high intensity police action’.  Since Genoa ‘the state of war has been permanent’.  There are attempts at neutralisation of resistance and innovation through ‘a surplus of violence, an overdetermination of terror’ and so war ‘comes to complete the sequence of discipline (of individuals) and control (of populations)’.  This is complex ‘because it is now become difficult to say what subjects confront each other’.

Distributed governance gives us warfare of all against all in varying intensity.  We do not know who our enemies are; they are people taking our disappearing livelihood, destroying our culture, associated with our loss of stability or status and so on.  Perhaps in this situation it is rational to fear refugees even when they are locked up?  

War shows the inclusive vagueness and hybridity of cyborg governance.  The same army drops bombs and medicine, destroys villages and provides food, tortures prisoners and holds elections.  NGOs are also involved, opposing the army and imposing their values.  The hybridity of privatization allows the formation of squads of ‘corporate warriors’, who act without any formal declaration of conflict and with blurred responsibility for their actions. ‘[W]ar and peace can no longer be outside one another’, they too are hybridised.  ‘War is the maintenance of peace’, peace is not the solution to war it is internal to it.  The enemy helps constitute legitimacy, so the vaguer the enemy the better, even if they are magnified to look like traditional objects of war.  Enemies show us ‘what power saves us from’.

In war there is temporary suspension of democracy, in never ending war the suspension increases.  This current war reacts against modernity, and the struggle waged to limit State violence against its citizens, to limit the weapons it could use against non-citizens, or the treatments it could impose on POWs. ‘[T]olerance a central value of modern thought is being dramatically undermined’ and torture becomes normalised. 

This continued war increases authoritarianism, and the idea of the just war, the religious war on evil is being resurrected from the feudal past.  This might suggest that rather than heading towards the democracy of the Multitude we are heading towards feudalism.  Perhaps feudalism could be seen as a network of power, and balances of power as well?  If the Nation State no longer defines the battle, then Postmodern war can appear like pre-modern war.  Hardt and Negri never take the possibility of a new feudalism seriously.  We don’t have to believe this would be a return to an earlier system, but an entirely contemporary information feudalism, in which the cyborg nobility took loyalty rather than gave it to their vassals, who face either total work or expulsion.

Total Work

Negri demands that all people have the right to move – because ‘the labour force [as cyborg] now no longer knows any boundaries’.  But what if people do not want to move?  Cyborgs may know no stability, but is this voluntary or submission to the systems they are within?  Should people be more vulnerable to temporary jobs?  We would have to be careful that this “right” to move, did not become a compulsion to move, and fragment connections between people even more.

In demanding a minimum wage, to allow reproduction of the work force and equal participation in health and knowledge, Negri asserts that ‘production has become indistinguishable from life itself’.  This suggests a total regime of work.  Nothing exists outside of production or, perhaps, is to exist outside of production.  Again old borders between public and private are confused.  This sits happily with the right’s insistence on wage labour for all, and no potential existence outside of wage labour – no social security etc.  Access to health can only be guaranteed if non productive existence for ordinary people is allowed – otherwise, if they are to remain non-productive, it is not economic to give them health care.

It seems more likely that if ‘everything that lives is part of the system of production’, then everything that lives will be seen as resources to hand (to use Heideggerian resonance) by the system to which we are plugged in.  Negri’s confluence of life action and production is depressing.  It leaves out all the non-productive actions which might be said to make life liveable or worthwhile.  Meaningful action, expressive action, restorative action, opening, contemplation, kindness, and the general form of what the Taoists call action without doing, wu-wei.  Even joy, becomes the way to production – ‘to the extent one constructs something in common’.  

This ethic of work, together with the threat of starvation is a basis of capitalist hegemony, and should be challenged in itself.  If people fear boredom without work, it simply shows how thoroughly their souls have been emptied by it.  The world is interest enough, and they have no self motivation outside of production and earning.  Productivity is part of life, but it is not the whole of life.

Democracy can only function if the multitude have leisure.  Therefore the first demand could be for free, survivable, unemployment for all who want it.  While there is a regime of constant work then there is no space for freedom of discussion, and a cyborg bound to a boss, to a market, or to a system, can know nothing of freedom.  Unemployment also faces authority directly with their fear of disorder – what will the unemployed find to occupy their time?  Business people will try and prevent those of lesser wealth from being outside the labour force – even though automation of the workplace was promoted as a way to increase our leisure.  

The Index of the Virtual

Over time, meaning of the term ‘virtual’ changes from ‘intrinsic power’, through ‘that which is so in essence or effect, although not formally or actually’, to ‘states of not quite being there’, to ‘almost’, ‘in effect’ or ‘not quite’, or ‘states demanded by the system’.  Nowadays the term ‘virtual’ is primarily used to refer to simulations, or partial representation, and hence has the connotations of being both powerful and a lesser replacement.  This ambiguous oscillation is important to its use, although rarely stated explicitly.  Its secondary meaning is ‘online’, as in ‘virtual communities’, where the paradoxical connotations remain the same.  We can see the communities as powerful harbingers of a new world, or as lesser substitutes for this one.  

The Indexical is constructed as well as actual (or actualised).  Although there is a metonymic link between smoke and fire, there is also a link between smoke and mist, smoke and gas release etc.  Indexes do not make a clear distinction between sign and the signified; fire could be an index of smoke.  Sign and signified occur together in contexts; usually interpreted as cause, connection or contiguity.  They are mutually intertwined, or bi-directional, even though one can appear without the other.  In making the indexical link we transform perception, and the way we act and add meaning.  Making representation can make something appear to be an index, when it may not be and indices appear to testify to presence when they may not.  

Thus cyborgs appear indexical of the virtual, as arising out of the virtual.  It is because of the demands of the system, the simulation, the wires, the control and the feedback that they appear to exist; as does the virtual.  However, at the same time we deduce the presence of the cyborg by the assumption of the virtual.  The hidden ambiguous inner power of the virtual makes us cyborg.  Thus we can think of cyberspace, the online virtual, as one of two things; either the one that we jack into and control, or the one which downloads into us, taking us over.  If the virtual is everywhere then it goes both ways.  

This essay harps on this ambiguity and oscillation rather than closing it.  We are both ‘tool using’ and ‘tool used’ animals.  A battery hen is as much a cyborg as a vacuum breathing, or computer using, human.  They may similarly be being used in the abolition of borders between human and non-human.  The model of the cyborg generally suppresses this conflict (or tearing), which is both internal and external, within its self proclaimed radical hybridity.

Reynolds argues that a standard practice of technocratic culture is for ‘the natural’ to be mutilated and rendered inoperative, and then repaired, improved, or made safe by artificial analogues of natural processes.  This is truly making an index.  We need not accept the idea of ‘untouched nature’, for this to be suggestive.  Cyborgisation, might be said to render the previously existent non-operable – hence its affiliation with myths of conquest and the expansion of techno-power.  It creates (spurious) unities, which are added indexes or contiguities, apparently over-riding conflicts through techno-naturalism.  Cyborgs are rarely independent creatures; they are usually connected into systems and controlled from elsewhere.  This ‘elsewhere’ need have no regard for local custom or local process.  The system can be programmed entirely to the centralised needs of techno-capitalism, with the cyborg becoming merely an appendage to its program.  This continues until the cyborg can be discarded for a new model, or until the whole system collapses.  

Thus it might be better for the contradictions of our lives to be emphasised, rather than blended into conceptual hybrids.  In which case the term cyborg could point to the fact that we have never been without tools and those tools have transformed both ourselves and the world.  It also could point to our being part of a technobiosociological system, with various control points and fragilities.  However, unless the ambiguity and terror is maintained, the term simply helps our incorporation.