Are clones cyborgs?
I'm working on my last and fifth chapter, and recently gave a presentation on it at a Children's Literature PhD day at Roehampton. I'm looking at a range of YA books about teenaged clones, and the paradox they create for adults: while adults enlist technology in order to reinforce their control over the unpredictability of having children, the products of this technology, the clones, exist outside the family structure and thus have the potential to disturb one of the main institutions that perpetuates the adult-child power hierarchy. I used Dona Haraway's Cyborg Manifesto where she suggests that a cyborg has no myth of origins. I claimed in my paper that clones are a kind of cyborg as they are 'made' rather than 'born'. This argument was seriously criticised, and my colleagues claimed that a cyborg does have 'parents' be it the scientist or the person from which the original DNA was taken. I wanted to ask what you thought of this.
Comments
I assume you've read this:
Edelman, No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive. Durham: Duke University Press, 2004.
Though I wouldn't argue that a clone necessarily has 'parents', I would say it's naive to assume it has no relation to the previous generation. Jon Turney's Frankenstein's Footsteps book might be useful to you.
Also, I'm SURE you've read this:
Esmonde, Margaret P (1982) ‘From Little Buddy to Big Brother: The Icon of the Robot in Children’s Science Fiction’, in Dunn, Thomas P & Erlich, Richard D (eds) The Mechanical God. Westport and London: Greenwood Press: 85-98.
But I found it recently and was fascinated. I have also been re-watching buffy season 7 and so thinking of Spike as a cyborg AND vampire in terms of Rob Langtham's book on the issue.
Posted by: alice | August 16, 2007 11:41 PM
On reflection, my earlier comment could have been more useful.
Is a clone a cyborg? To my understanding, no, not really, because cyborg life is all about compromise, where as cloning is about reproduction. It has a singular origin.
Have you tried looking in Haraway's (1997) Modest_Witness@Second Millennium? I'm sure she talks about clones in that.
Also, have you looked into the work on on post-humanity (N. Katherine Hayles et al?)
Posted by: alice | August 17, 2007 06:29 PM
This question also crosses over robotics and bioethics, cool. I think the answer lies in your perspective. I hate to bring in second order cybernetics again -- but it always depends on your point of view.
if clones and cyborgs are both the results of an intentional bio/technological process then they are alike in having been created in this way. from an epistemological perspective they are totally different: think of sentience, imagination, memory.
so if i was to clone myself and build me a cyborg (to finish writing my thesis and typset the bibliography, respectively) i might see them both in similar light; but they will be completely different creatures internally.
your colleagues' idea that a cyborg's scientist creator is like a 'parent' is a metaphor that makes sense, considering your are focus on the creator/parents' point of view.
Posted by: Katherine | August 18, 2007 01:19 PM
I guess it'll also really depends on the way the clone is depicted - the parental relationship might be genetic (where the biological relationship comes), or more social (who brought it up). I think Katherine has a point in drawing up the creator/ parent link - I liked Esmonde's article on this subject (Robot kids in families)
There was a great paper given at the BSLS conference last spring on how the clone interrupts familiar relationships
Sara Wasson, Napier U, ‘Recalcitrant Copies and Vulnerable Bodies: Literary Engagements with Human Cloning'
Posted by: alice | August 18, 2007 05:21 PM
Well, you certainly got me thinking there. I have read Esmonde's article a while back, and lots of works about post humanism (including Hayles), but not familiar with other things you both mentioned, so I'll look them up.
Re the scientist as a 'parent', well, that can be said of the cyborg as well. I think Haraway was talking about the Western myth of origins, as in Adam and Eve and Original Sin. It will be interesting to read her other article in that respect. Thanks! I’ll keep you posted as to my argument...:)
Posted by: Noga | August 29, 2007 12:10 PM
Ha! I just contacted Sara Wasson that Alice mentioned as giving a great talk at the BSLS conference. She kindly sent me her paper, but also one that was published in Extrapolation in 2004 (45:2, pp. 130-144), and there, after quoting Haraway, she muses "Might it be possible to read the clone as multiplying lines of connection a la the cyborg?" and her answer is "Perhaps not. For what is so interesting about cloning is that it is almost the opposite of the cyborg situation as Haraway sketches it, and here we uncover the fear that death is a matter of origins. For the cyborg’s political vitality is enabled by her diffuse origin: free of any past Eden, she can symbolize the partial, strategic, and blatantly constructed positionalities arguably suitable for contemporary political struggle. But while the cyborg’s origin is dispersed through flesh and steel, the clone’s origin concentrates both in one moment. For the clone not only has a moment of origin, she has an original, and awareness of the original often freights the clone with fatality just as the cyborg’s birthlessness lets her exploit new possibility". Right. Now I really have to rethink things. Thanks Alice (and Sara!).
Posted by: Noga | August 29, 2007 03:34 PM