As Donna Haraway puts it, " Our machines are disturbingly lively, and we ourselves frighteningly inert"...
Thinking about cyborgs provides a way to talk about bodies without losing sight of the material (or technological) conditions that ground their lived experience.
As we learn that bodies are susceptible to technological augmentation and enhancement, we find that the so-called natural body isn't quite so natural, unconstructed, or innocent after all.
But talking about cyborgs means talking as much about technology as about bodies, and talking even more about how received conceptions of both bodies and technology uphold the very structures and processes that gave rise to such distinctions in the first place. As technological reconstructions of the body become commonplace, it is necessary to confront technology's political dimension, as a power to shape individuals -- to shape the body politic. Just as cyborgs integrate a variety of technological prostheses in order to constitute their own subjectivities, hypertext writing allows both reader and writer to weave their own meanings from a set of disparate textual elements.
