Where are the Cyborgs in Cybernetics?

Abstract

Cyborgs — cybernetic organisms, hybrids of humans and machines — have pervaded everyday life, the military, popular culture, and the academic world since the advent of cyborg studies in the mid 1980s. They have been a recurrent theme in STS in recent decades, but there are surprisingly few cyborgs referred to in the early history of cybernetics in the USA and Britain. In this paper, I analyze the work of the early cyberneticians who researched and built cyborgs. I then use that history of cyborgs as a basis for reinterpreting the history of cybernetics by critiquing cyborg studies that give a teleological account of cybernetics, and histories of cybernetics that view it as a unitary discipline. I argue that cyborgs were a minor research area in cybernetics, usually classified under the heading of `medical cybernetics', in the USA and Britain from the publication of Wiener's Cybernetics in 1948 to the decline of cybernetics among mainstream scientists in the 1960s. During that period, cyberneticians held multiple interpretations of their field. Most of the research on cybernetics focused on the analogy between humans and machines — the main research method of cybernetics — not the fusion of humans and machines, the domain of cyborgs. Although many cyberneticians in the USA and Britain viewed cybernetics as a `universal discipline', they created contested, area-specific interpretations of their field under the metadiscourse of cybernetics.