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“Cyborg Information Leaflet: Thyroxine 50 Microgram Tablets“
Undergraduate coursework created by Alison Buckler.
The students’ first task in the ‘Geographies of Material Culture’ module at the University of Birmingham is to make a personal connection between their lives and the lives of others elsewhere in the world who made the things they buy. These are the people who help you to be you, followthethings.com CEO Ian tells them. Because you’re a cyborg, your body cannot function without the people, animals, technologies, networks that makes its inputs like food and medicine. So choose a commodity that matters to you, that’s an important part of your identity, that you couldn’t do without. Think about its component parts, its materials, and the properties they give to that commodity and your experience of ‘consuming it’. See what you can find online and write a 500 word first person account that connects your lives. One student – Alison Buckler – chose the most personal example we ever saw, a medicine that’s keeping her alive. It’s not a discretionary commodity that she could do without. It’s not something where there’s an organic of fair trade alternative. So what can she find out about its origins, it’s life before it came into her life and made such a positive difference? And how can she convey what she has learned? In every box of pills, there’s a patient information leaflet. So Alison rewrites the one that comes with her Thyroxine tablets to provide a different kinds of information for a patient. A different understanding of their body and the way that it works, and what’s helping this medicine to help it work. This leaflet’s information is based on an extroverted sense of the body – a cyborg ontology – where the inside and the outside are intimately linked. What comes with this are senses of both astonishment and guilt. This was the first follow-the-meds example to appear on followthethings.com, and it inspired all the others…
Page reference: Alison Buckler (2004) Cyborg Information Leaflet: Thyroxine 50 Microgram Tablets. followthethings.com/cyborg-information-leaflet-thyroxine-50-microgram.shtml (last accessed <insert date here>)
Estimated reading time: 14 minutes.
Original
Endnotes
1 The term “cyborg” was created in 1960, however as/with most things, it existed long before its definition. IN a movement led by American geographer Donna Harraway, it involves thinking about individuals (cyborgs) as part of intricate networks as opposed to being “isolated from the world” (Kunzru 1997). This “Cyborg Information Leaflet” provides information for me, the individual that requires Thyroxine to function on a day-to-day basis, but also, proof that I am cyborg thus helping to perpetrate the vast web of science, knowledge and technology that sustains me (Hables-Gray et al 1995, Kunzru 1997).
2 This is the actual wording on the “real” patient information leaflet. I doubt my doctor or pharmacist would be equipped to answer the questions posed in this journal! Medication is a good starting point for thinking about the cyborg idea, sparking the realisation that the body is a cyborg (an (artificially?) functioning organism) but is also involved in global transfers of politics, technology and action that lead to the construction of the medication and hence the person.
3 Hables-Gray et al (1995, p.2) describes a cyborg as an “organism that combines natural and artificial together in one system”. By choosing what we put into (and onto) our bodies, we are “constructing ourselves” (Kunzru 1997); literally building and maintaining (and at times destroying) the cells that make the tissues that constitute our physical being. In this sense, taking Thyroxine is essential to keep my body (the cyborg) functioning correctly. Haraway (1991 p.150) claims “modern medicine is full of cyborgs, or couplings between organisms and machine”. Thyroxine (in synthetic form) is absorbed and utilised by my body thius creating a fusion of human and science. Hables-Gray et al (1995 p. 10) believes that “…for many young people being ‘borged’ is empowering”. It certainly empowers me, allowing me to not just live a normal life, but to live. Indeed as scientific knowledge grows (itself dependent on political and economic considerations) increasing numbers of people the world over, are being kept alive by medical technology. Thus cyborgs, as Hables-Gray et al (1995 p.19) explains, “…are re- defining many of the basic concepts of human existence”.
4 These connections are not neat. Law and Hetherington (2000) claim; “technologies-and-knowledge-about-technologies-and-a-good-deal-of-hard-work-and-capitalist-economic-relations determine (parts of?) social life”. Though the technology (determined by social and political climates) necessary to create a synthetic form of Thyroxine has been maintaining me for five years, I had never before considered the extent of these, nor the Geographical spaces and places created and connected by its (and subsequently my) existence. Indeed Law and Hetherington (2000) claim these spaces do not exist until they are realised, are simply taken for granted. Nor had I ever considered the alternative; should these particular connections not have been made in my life-time, I would be eating fried sheep’s thyroid marinated in brandy or I would have a pig’s gland grafted onto my neck… or I would simply not exist. This brings to the fore the debate posed by Haraway (1991 p. 178) in that the more we think about ourselves as cyborg, the more we realise “our bodies do not end at the skin” and that with “cyborg as our ontology… we are biological organism in a biotic system”.
5 Another node in the network of Thyroxine production is the transport of acacia gum across the deserts of Egypt by camel. Acacia powder (a derivative of acacia gum) is an essential component of many tablets, including Thyroxine (Grieve 1995). Recent reports from the “St. Katherine Protectorate” in Egypt explain the increased loads ot maximise profits, are damaging the camels’ spines, requiring the involvement of chirovetpractics (chiropractors for quadrupeds, Scanlan 2002). The literature states that the livelihoods of the Bedouin people are dependent on their camels (Cairo Cabinet of Ministers 2001). However they are also dependent on the medical training (again the transfer of knowledge and technology) of vets, who are necessary because capitalist economic policies have dictated the commercial production of the Acacia tree. Then of course we must consider the factors that assist in co-ordinating the transportation of the acacia gum to a factory where it is refined and manufactured into powder form, transported again to a pharmaceutical company which combines it with synthetic Thyroxine and several other ingredients to become the tablet I pop in my mouth along with my cornflaxes each morning. Not forgetting of course the manufacture of packaging (recycled cardboard) and what happens when I throw this in the bin to be carried away by refuse trucks to a landfill somewhere. Every stage depends on the decisions and actions of countless people utilising countless technologies and objects. Somewhere in this mind-numbing journey is me. In taking Thyroxine I am dependent on the factors that assist me in obtaining it, and I am perpetrating the need for such a process so that it is also dependent on me. Thus, returning to Haraway (1991 p.176) we begin to see how we, as individuals, are “fully implicated ni the world”. The livelihoods of the Bedouin are indeed dependent on their camels but also, in a small way, dependent on me.
6 Once the cyborg notion is realised, it is near impossible to revert to an individualistic mind-set. As Kunzru (1997) asserts after interviewing Donna Harraway, life is messier than we could ever imagine. Nothing is neutral, humans, knowledge, technology, power… are all intrinsically connected and can make or destroy one another in a reality that is “dynamic and lumpy” (Hables-Gray et al 1995 p.12). Being cyborg is important because it means you are alive. Being a cyborg implies particiption in this “messy” (Haraway 1991, p.172) world. It means you matter. Taking Thyroxine is not a parasitic activity that affects only the body on which it has direct medicinal effect, but an automatic and unavoidable inclusion into a chaotic, symbiotic relationship with people, places (camels) and processes that form just one more integrated system through which the world exists, produces and reproduces.
Page compiled and posted by Ian Cook (last updated May 2011). Page created as coursework for the ‘Geographies of material culture’ module at the University of Birmingham. Reproduced with kind permission of the author.
Sources
Cairo Cabinet of Ministers (2001) St Katherine Protectorate Veterinary Programme. stkparks.gov.eg (www.stkparks.gov.eg/stk-img-cameltreatment.html last accessed January 2004, page no longer available)
Grieve, M. (1995) Acacia (Gum). in her A modern Herbal. Tiger Books (www.botanical.com/botanical/mgmh/a/acaci006.html last accessed 10 May 2011)
Hables Gray, C., Mentor, S. & Figueroa-Sarriera, H. (1995) Cyborgology: constructing the knowledge of cybernetic organisms. in their (ed.) The cyborg handbook. London: Routledge, 1-14.
Haraway, D. (1991) A cyborg manifesto: science, technology and socialist-feminism in the late twentieth century. in her Simians, cyborgs and women: the reinvention of nature. New York: Routledge, 149-181 (www.stanford.edu/dept/HPS/Haraway/CyborgManifesto.html last accessed 16 February 2011)
+3 sources
Kunzru, H. (1997) You are cyborg: for Donna Haraway, we are already assimilated. Wired February (www.wired.com/wired/archive/5.02/ffharaway_pr.html last accessed 16 February 2011)
Law, J. & Hetherington, K. (2000) Materialities, spatialities, globalities. in Bryson, J., Daniels, P., Henry, N. & Pollard, J. (eds) Knowledge, space, economy. London: Routledge, 34-49
Scanlan, J. (2002) Chirovetpractic treatment of the camel. chirovetpractic.com 25 January (www.chirovetpractic.com/thecamel.html last accessed 10 May 2011)
Image credit
Close-up of a woman’s hand taking medicine (https://www.freepik.com/free-photo/close-up-woman-s-hand-taking-medicine_3480384.htm#fromView=image_search_similar&page=1&position=18&uuid=0ccf9260-09a2-4a7e-bfc0-a8f1cc06d181) by freepik (freepik).