It was fifteen years ago that the Italian publishing house, Teoria, first published a book by Antonio Caronia [*]. Its prophetic title was Il Cyborg: Saggio Sull'uomo Artificiale (The Cyborg: An Essay on Artificial Man). During the 90s, it enjoyed several reprints, and, in 2001, ShaKe Edizioni, one of the most significant underground publishers in Italy, released a completely new edition
Caronia (born 1944) is an engineer, a philosopher, and a radical activist for cyber-rights. As an author, he tries to detect cultural change as it unfolds and to anticipate trends. Indeed, Caronia's Il Cyborg was published one year before Donna Haraway's "Cyborg Manifesto" and his Il Corpo Virtuale (Muzzio, 1996) hit the booksellers three years before N. Katherine Hayles' How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics. His career is full of such exploits, but unfortunately -- Italian being his main language -- the international audience hardly knows him.
This updated version of his essay about hybrids between human and machine
is still convincing after a slew of new technological developments including
the Internet, virtual reality, artificial
. intelligence, and genetics, a testament to how well the book has aged.
The first part of the text provides a genealogy of Cyborg discourse,
itself originating in the science fiction novels of the 1920s and 30s,
where, in order to enable survival in outer space, humans were wedded
to automatic parts. But the Cyborg is not simply an electromechanical
"soft robot." In the second part of the book, Caronia analyses
the new generation of hybridized human beings, moving from the chemical
Cyborg of Clynes and Kline's pharmacological experiments in the 1960s
[1], through the cyberpunk utopias of 1984, and to early 1990s VR avatars
and contemporary genetic manipulations. Caronia thereby expands the
discourse of the artificial body to include many applications of chemical,
physical and informational technologies.
As audacious as it may seem, such an expansion of the discursive field is now a matter of fact in the scientific and pseudo-scientific literature the last ten years, as found in science fiction, cyberculture studies, and Wired-like magazines. Technologies have intruded the body, simultaneously contaminating and empowering it. For citizens of the global age, the dualism between nature and culture is no longer relevant. The notion of the body as flesh that uses technology seems now to be only a remnant of old-fashioned philosophical traditions. It has been replaced by the idea, widespread in the rhetoric of the post-biological body in the late twentieth-century, that every technology is a practice of the self-inducing bodily mutations according to a particular anti-ergonomics.