Abstract:

 “Cyborg” has gradually become a popular term in academic research and popular culture since the 1960s, but its connotation is often ambiguous. From the perspective of its conceptual genealogy, the term “cyborg” invented by Manfred E. Clynes and Nathan S. Kline is based on the image of the mechanized man, but the definition of “cyborg”—“cybernetic organism”— covers the idea of pure machine. Interpreting “cyborg” from the perspective of postmodern philosophy, Donna J. Haraway explicates it as an ontological metaphor and a political myth of irony, producing an intellectual discourse about cyborg that separates the concept from what it originally signifies. These two interpretations enrich the substantive meaning and metaphorical meaning of “cyborg”, but also cause confusion of its signification. According to Wittgenstein’s theory, what “cyborg” expresses is a gamified lexical field and an aggregated image group. It is embodied in four types of entity: the supplementary, the machine-implanted, the agentic, and the virtual model. If a consensus on the substantive meaning of “cyborg” is denied, it may end up in chaos due to the endless metaphors.

Key words:

cyborg; Manfred E. Clynes, Nathan S. Klein, Donna J. Haraway, cybernetics, metaphor