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“Late twentieth-century machines have made thoroughly ambiguous the difference between natural and artificial, mind and body, self-developing and externally designed, and many other distinctions that used to apply to organisms and machines. Our machines are disturbingly lively, and we ourselves frighteningly inert.”³⁴¹

Truth be known, as Haraway goes on to argue, we are all cyborgs now – part human, part machine in our experience of the world. Even though the machines have become a bigger part of our lives, in some senses as a species we have been cyborgs all along. In our species-nature, we have all along been tool-using animals, homo faber, where objects are essential extensions of the self. This is how the impossibly separated body becomes the possible self of inseparably multimodal object–body enactment. To move the body at such speeds was impossible before the railway. To think at such speeds was impossible before the computer.

“The difference between machine and organism is thoroughly blurred; mind, body, and tool are on very intimate terms.”³⁴² However, we have also been at war with the machine because it has been an instrument of our domination as often as it has, by bodily extension, created new affordances for our meaning.

Henry Ford accounted for his life in a best-selling moral tale, My Life and Work. Here he disclosed, to those who might aspire to follow in his steps, the secrets of his phenomenal success as an inventor and businessman. The key was to supplement unskilled bodies and untrained minds with bodily and mental extensions of the machine and the factory.

Ford’s message was not in support of differently abled access when he said,

The blind man or cripple man can, in the particular place to which he is assigned, perform just as much work and receive exactly the same pay as a wholly able bodied man would … To discover what was the real situation, I had all of the different jobs in the factory classified to the kind of machine and work … It turned out at the time of the inquiry that there were then 7882 different jobs in the factory. Of these, 949 were classified as heavy work requiring strong, able bodied and practically physically perfect men … The lightest jobs were classified to discover how many of them required the use of full faculties and we found that 670 could be filled by legless men, 2637 by one-legged men, 2 by armless men, 715 by one-armed men and 10 by blind men.

Which meant that the machines could do what eyes, arms, and legs might otherwise have been required to do. And of course, the division of labor was so finely differentiated into minimalist tasks, that few workers required much training: “The length of time to become proficient in the various occupations is about as follows: 43 per cent of jobs require not over one day of training; 36 per cent require from one day to one week; 6 per cent require from one to two weeks; 14 per cent require from one month to one year; one per cent required from one to six years.”³⁴³

The celebrated theorist of the modern factory, Frederick Winslow Taylor, laid out the process of parsing the multimodal relation of body and machine in his classic Principles of Scientific Management. “Study the exact series of elementary operations or motions which each of these men uses in doing the work which is being investigated, as well as the implements each man uses … Study with a stop watch the time required to make each of these elementary movements and then select the quickest way of doing each element of the work … Eliminate all false movements, slow movements and useless movements … After doing away with all unnecessary movements, collect into one series the quickest and best movements.”³⁴⁴ This was a science of cyborgs, of human–machine integration where bodies themselves could be conceived mechanistically.

“Taylor’s system,” Vladimir Lenin^§MS0.2.9a wrote in the Bolshevik Party’s newspaper, Pravda, “without the knowledge and against the will of its authors, is preparing that time when the proletariat will seize all production into its hands and will assign its own workers’ commissions for the proper distribution and regulation of all social labor.”³⁴⁵

So, in the Central Institute of Labor directed by Aleksei Gastev, a writer and poet of some fame, these preparations were made. The human body was to be an efficient machine, and machines were there at least in part to replace bodies. The human was robot, and the robot was substitute human, and various intermediate permutations. Such machine–body transpositions were for the purpose of liberating labor from its former oppressions.

Brain machines – high load.

Cinema eyes – fix.

Electric nerves – to work.

Arterial pumps, activate.

When writer Maxim Gorky visited the institute, he embraced Gastev: “Now I understand why you have left fiction.”³⁴⁶

Working at the Scientific and Research Institute for Jet Propulsion in Moscow, in 1931 and then again in 1938 Ary Sternfeld patented an apparatus that he called an “android,” which registered the movements of the human body for the purpose of their reproduction in machines.

Sternfeld survived Stalin, but Gastev did not. During Stalin’s purges, he was tried and shot in 1939 for being connected with “the conspiratorial organization the Real Trotskyites.” Leon Trotsky was Stalin’s by-then-banished rival, also soon-to-be-murdered.³⁴⁷ Bullets are another kind of machine–body engagement, cruel extensions of the shooting body and the interests of its body politic.

At the end of the same century, Donna Haraway’s feminist call was “explicitly embracing the possibilities inherent in the breakdown of clean distinctions between organism and machine and similar distinctions structuring the Western self … embracing the skillful task of reconstructing the boundaries of daily life … [S]cience and technology are possible means of great human satisfaction, as well as a matrix of complex dominations.”³⁴⁸ Her challenge: to embrace the cyborg as a scope for human possibility rather than an instrument of oppression; to make peace with the machine.

Walter Benjamin again: “in technology, body, image and space so interpenetrate that all revolutionary tension becomes bodily collective innervation.”³⁴⁹

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³⁴¹ Donna Haraway, 1985 [2016], A Manifesto for Cyborgs: Science, Technology, and Socialist Feminism in the 1980s, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, pp. 7, 11.

³⁴² Ibid., p. 36.

³⁴³ Henry Ford, 1922, My Life and Work, Sydney, Australia: Angus & Robertson, pp. 103–10.

³⁴⁴ Frederick Winslow Taylor, 1911, The Principles of Scientific Management, New York: Harper & Brothers, pp. 117–18; Charles D. Wrege and Ronald G. Greenwood, 1991, Frederick W. Taylor, the Father of Scientific Management: Myth and Reality, Homewood, IL: Business One Irwin.

³⁴⁵ Mark R. Beissinger, 1988, Scientific Management, Socialist Discipline, and Soviet Power, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, p. 23.

³⁴⁶ Andrey Smirnov, 2013, Sound in Z: Experiments in Sound and Electronic Music in Early 20th Century Russia, London: Koenig Books, p. 106.

³⁴⁷ Ibid., pp. 111, 105–06, 260.

³⁴⁸ Donna Haraway, 1985 [2016], A Manifesto for Cyborgs: Science, Technology, and Socialist Feminism in the 1980s, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, pp. 67, 53, 67.

³⁴⁹ Walter Benjamin, 1929 [1999], “Surrealism: The Last Snapshot of the European Intelligentsia,” pp. 207–21 in Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, Volume 2: 1927–1934, edited by M.W. Jennings, H. Eidland, and G. Smith, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, p. 217.

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Kalantzis, Mary, and Bill Cope. 2020. Adding Sense: Context and Interest in a Grammar of Multimodal Meaning. Cambridge UK: Cambridge University Press. pp. 134–137. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108862059

Donna Haraway’s “Cyborg Manifesto” §AS1.4.3e