Gaia-the blue-and green-hued, whole, living, self-sustaining, adaptive, auto-poietic earth-and the Terminators-the jelled-metal, shape-shifting, cyber-enhanced warriors fighting in the stripped terrain landscapes and extraterrestrial vacuums of a terrible future-seem at first glance to belong in incompatible universes. Such beings seem to inhabìt incor"mensurable regions of space-time, and to demand different literary and historical chronotopes for their deseription and narration. These entities do not seem able to share the same evolutionary story. Similarly, the world's first being to be called 'cyborg" - a white laboratory rat at New York's Rockland State Hospital in the late 1950s, with a tiny osmotic pump implanted in its body to inject chemicals at a controlled rate to alter its physiological parameters - does no: seem to be close kin to the naturally oecurring microorganism Mixofrleha paradoxa-a protist denizen of the hindgut of a South Austraiian termite. The implanted rat and the metal-flesh wat-rior seem to be paradigmatic cyborgs,
the perfect postmodern poster-children for the New World Order's ad campaigns.
Surely, the whole earth and its natural offspring have a different ontolology. But all four of these entities-the cloud-wrapped whole earth named after the Greek goddess who gave birth (incestuously) to the Titans, the machine-enhanced warriors with a cinematic future, the rat cyborg in a sychiatric hospital, and the microorganism with the intriguin Latin name - are members of the same post-World War II clan. This clan is also the human family in a globalized New World Order. That order has emerged from the fusion reactions of the cold war and the space race and from the turbulent planetary flows of capital in the last half-century of the Second Christian Millennium. The practices which bind the global family together in a generative matrix are no mere metaphoric flights of fancy· these practices are the simultaneously fiercely material and irreducibly imaginary, world-destroying and world-building processes of technoscience.
Procducts of romiscuous mixings and fusings, Earth Goddess Terminator Enhanced
Guest a demand that we think about three basic questions: What are the terms for living together in the New World Order? Who will find which terms to be livable? and What is to be done. Let us sneak up on these tendentious questions by examining more closely each of the four beings populating my cyborg pretext. This narrative is in the tradition of edifying natural history, or better, natur
al-technical history; and it prefaces the rich handbook that follows. My imploded storyinsists on the inextricable weave ofthe organic, technical, textual, mythic, economic, and political threads that make up the flesh of the world.
Gaia is the name that James Lovelock gave in 1969 to his hypothesis that the third planet from the sun, our home, is a "complex entity involving the Earth's biosphere, atmosphere, oceans, and soil; the totality constituting a feedback or cybernetic system which seeks an optimal physical and chemical environment for life on this planet" (Lovelock 1979:11). An independent English specialist in gas chromatography and the inventor of the electron capture detector, in the 1960s Lovelock was working as a consultant for the United States National Aeronautics and Space Administration's (NASA) Voyager program at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory at the California Institute of Technology to devise a means to detect whether there was life on Mars. Fundamental problems for the project turned on defining what constituted life and thinking about how to detect it on Mars gave a fresh perspective on how to think about life on earth. Working with Dian Hitchcock, who was evaluating the logic and information potential of various suggestions for detecting Martian life, Lovelock developed the notion of perceiving life through atmospheric analysis, by looking for persistent entropy-defying disequilibria. But in 1965 the U.S. Congress abandoned the Martian exploration program, although the venture was later resumed in the Viking expeditions. In the low period for space expioration during the mid-1960s, Lovelock benefited from the free research atmosphere provided by the giant petroleum corporation Shell to study air pollution resulting from burning fossil fuels The determinations of multinational
capital rarely take the shape of restricting the intellectual freedom of the scientific elite. Quite the opposite; no one understands better how critical that kind of free play is to dynamic accumulation strategies. Lovelock approached the pollution problem from the point of view of the atmosphere as an adaptive mechanism that was an extension of the biosphere. Perturbations had to be studied as part of a self-regulating system, in which compensatory changes in response to toxins could very well produce new dynamic steady states that would change the species composition of earth drastically.Global atmospheric research is at the origin of struggles over livable environments in cyborg worlds. Going from measurements of gases in the earth's atmosphere, Lovelock reasoned that the observed composition could not be maintained by chemical processes alone.The earth's atmosphere showed a stunning disequilibrium that suggested not only that it was the product of the life-processes of organisms; but more,a disequilibrium of such scale implied that the atmosphere was an extension of a living system designed to maintain an optimal environment for its own support.In short,the whole earth was a dynamic,self-regulating, homeostatic system; the earth,with alI its interwoven layers and articulated parts,from the planet,s pulsating skin through its fulminating gaseous envelopes,was itself alive. Lovelock's perception was that of a systems engineer gestated in the space program and the multinational energy industry and fed on the heady brew of cybernetics in the 1950s and 1960s,not,say,the intuition of a vegetarian feminist mystic suspicious of the cold war's military-industrial complex and its patriarchal technology.Lovelock's earth-itself a cyborg,a complex auto-poietic system that terminally blurred the boundaries among the geological, the organic,and the technological-was the natural habitat,and the launching pad, of other cyborgs.
And just as the pod people in the classic 1956 film The lnvosion of tfie Body
Snatchers looked exactly like humans not yet transformed by infectious extraterrestrial restrial cosmic seeds-vectors of a different lire,of species-transforming information-one could not tell by looking that the earth and its inhabitants had become cyborgs.The transformation implicit in Lovelock's preseient perspective was in the fleshy tissues of meaning.The whole earth,a cybernetic organism,a cyborg,was not some freakish contraption of welded flesh and metal,worthy of a bad television program with a short run.As Lovelock realized,the cybernetic Gaia is,rather, what the earth looks like from the only vantage point from which she could be seen-from the outside,from above.Gaia is not a figure of the whole earth's self-knowledge,but of her discovery,indeed,her literal constitution,in a great travel epic.The signals emanating from an extraterrestrial perspective, such as the photographic eye of a space ship,are relayed and translated through the information-processing machines built by the members of a voraciously energy-consuming,space-faring hominid culture that called itself Mankind.And Man is by self-definition,a globalizing and,therefore,global species.The people who built the semiotic and physical technology to see Gaia became the global species,in which they recognized themselves,through the concrete practices by which they built their knowledge.This species depends on an evolutionary narrative technology that builds dramatically from the first embryonie tool-weapon wielded by the primal hunter to the transformation of himself into the potent tool-weapon that seeds other worlds.To see Gaia,Man learns to position himself physically as an extraterrestrial observer looking back on his earthly womb and matrix.The cyborg point of view is literal,material,and technieal; it is built located,and specific-like all meaning-making apparatuses.Whatever else it is,the cyborg point ofview is always about communication,infection, gender genre,species,intercourse,information,and semiology.
The material fictions of Man,his lived primal story are the imaginative technologies of NASA.On Novernber 9,1967,Apollo 4 sent back to earth from 9,850 nautical miles above its surface the rirst U.S.picture of the whole earth.That family snapshot-grandmother to the Swedish photographer Leonard Nilsson's 1977 famous,gorgeous,global,gold-gleaming,extraterrestrál,aborted human fetuses
published in A Child Is Born-has been disseminated on everything from protesters T-shirts at the Nevada nuclear test site,to the cover of the Whole Earth Catalog,to the packaging for the Maxis Corporation's best-selling computer game based on the Gaia hypothesis, SimEarth. NASA's whole-earth image is like a picture on eed catalogue. Seed of the future, concentrating all the potencies of an infinite series of past acts of generation, the shining,
cloud-wrapped whole earth is like a giant and Iuscious tomato, planted around the world with the aid of the marketing apparatus of the petroleum-industry-owned major seed companies and promising all the lusty tastes of a sun-drenehed summer.

Like Gaia, the Terminator is a cyborg. But the elan of enhanced warriors narrows down the contradictory, weedy, contestable,wide-band, semiological plenum of Gaia to a laser-focused line of embodied meanings Like Gaia, the proliferation in fantasy and in reality of a grotesque menagerie of cyborg weapons has also occurred in the multi-lobed wombs of bump-
tious multinational capital, ascendant technoscience, and constitutively militarized post-World War II nation states But the Terminator is a child-weapon that Man-the-Hunter perhaps did not really anticipate as he struck out on his grand quest narrative through the fossil volcanic ash
and cosmic moon dust of post-World War II U.S. origin and exploration stories The Terminator is much more than the morphed body of a virile film star in the 1990s:
The Terminator is the sign of the beast on the face of postmodern culture, the sign of the Sacred Image of the Same.
The figure of the Terminator appears to take many forms, The Terminator is the self-sufficient, self-generated Tool in all of its infinite but self-identical variations.
It can be the transfused blood fraternity of information machine and human warrior in the cyber-enhanced airforce cockpit, those pilot projects for the equally-or maybe more-profitable commercial cyborg theme parks and virtual reality arcades
to follow in the great technology transfer game from military practices to the civilian economy that has characterized cyborg worlds. Or the enhanced weapons can be the all-information-machine versions called smart bombs, which make such riveting television programming in the New World Order's police
actions. The Terminator, like the decontextualized glowing fetus, can appear to be our savior; indeed that is its favorite and most alluring morph. Like Gaia, the mercurial Terminator is also an image on the seed package of a possible future. We
seem still to be hungry for its enhanced and gleaming fruits
It is time to move from the all-too-real, ideal cyborg warrior to the lowly, and decidedly mortal, figure of a Iaboratory white rat implanted with a cyber-control device. Like all cyborgs, this white rat has thát something extra, that sign of excess that marks the creature as somehow "trans" to what once counted as normal and natural. Appropriate to a
world that contains Gaia and the Terminator, the term "cyborg" was coined by Manfred E. Clynes and Nathan S. Kline (1960) to refer to the enhanced man who could survive in extra-terrestrial environments.' They imagined the cyborgian
man-machine hybrid would be needed in the next great technohumanist challenge-space flight. Most Western narratives of humanism and technology
require each other constitutively: how. else could man make himself? Du Pont had the right idea: "Better things for better living." A designer of physiological instrumentation and electronic data-processing systems, Clynes was the chief researeh
scieritist in the Dynamic Simulation Laboratory at Rockland State Hospital in New York. Director of researeh at Rockland State, Kline was a clinical psychiatrist. Their article was based on a paper the authors gave at the Psychophysiological Aspects
of Space Flight Symposium sponsored by the U.S. Air Force Sehool of Aviation Medicine in San Antonio, Texas. Enraptured with cybernetics, they thought of
cyborgs as "self-regulating man-machine systems" (Clynes and Kline 1960:27).
Space-bound cyborgs were like miniaturized, self-contained Gaias. One of Clynes and Kline's first cyborgs, a kind of pilot project for Gaia-Man, was our standard white laboratory rat implanted with ar> osmotic pump designed to inject chemicals
continuously to modify and regulate homeostatic states The rodent's picture was featured in the article that named its ontological cyborg condition. The snapshot belongs in Man's family album.

Beginning with the rats who stowed away on the masted ships of Europe's imperial age of exploration, rodents have gone first into the unexplored regions in the great travel narratives of Western technoscience. Odo, the shape-shifter security chief on the Federation, space station Depp Space Nine, in one early episode of that television series even morphed himself into the shape of 2 rat, all the better to get a perspective on the dubious traffic at the entrance to the wormhole, galevay to,un explored ;regions of space. Anthropologist Deborah Heath, who studies the ures of genetic techology, tells me that one of the avidly sought, candidate genes for human breast-cancer has been named Odo by the research team attemtpting to isolate and sequence it. Meanwhile, Deep Space Ninc, with all its ilexible bedies, is ideal for the reduced expectations of techriophilic U.S.-ers in the New World Order of the 1990s (Nlartin 1994; Harvey 19ô9). I certainly cannot recall any rat morphed aliens or not, on the starships Enferprist in the earlier genera :ions of the Star Trek myth.

Human mental patierlts were also part of psychiatric researeh on neural-chemical
impl2nts and telemetric monitoring at Rockland State Hospital in the 1960s, a fact I learrned from National Science Foundation and National Institutes of Mental Health grant proposals when I was researehing the crafting of non-human primates as model systems for human ills in the U.S. Kline was associated with the Psychiatric Researeh Foundation in New York, an organization established to promote controversial investigatíons into psýcho-pharmacology. Nañcy Campbell's
(t994) work on ihe history of U.S. drug and addiction discourses details the dovetailing of such researeh in the 1950s and 1960s with Cold War agendas, including C.I.A-sponsored researeh on behavior control. The liberal philanthropic foundations, especially the Macy Foundation, which was so importartt to the confguration of cybernetics as an interdisciplinary field in the late 1940s and early 1950s, were liberally invulved. Geof Bowker (1993) analyzes the myriad routes through whieh technical and popular culture was shooting up with all things cybérnetic iri the 1550s arid 60s in the U.S. Marge Piercy used researeh at Rockland State Hospital as background for the brain-implant experiments praeticed on psychiatric patients in her transformative feminist science-fiction story, Woman on the Edge of Time (1976). Influenced by Piercy, in my "Manifesto for Cyborgs," I used the cyborg as a blasphemous anti-racíst feminist figure reshaped for scienee-studies analyses and fen,inist theory alike (Haraway 1985). Piercy develuped her thinking about the
cyborg as lover, friend, object, subject, weapon, and golem in He, She, ar;d lt(1991). Her cyborgs and mine became "trans" to their origins, defying their founding identities as weapons and self-acting control devices, thus trying to trouble U.S. cultural eommitments to what counts as agency and self-determination for people-and for other organisms and machines.
Subsisting not in the vast reaches of interstellar space, where the 1950s rat cyborg was semiotieally bound, but in the dark passages of a termité s gut, the humble Mixofricho paradoxa is perhaps most "trans" of all to standard natural history accounts of unity and agency in cyborg lives lived within the crevices and fluids of Gaia's multi-form flesh. Cyborg)s are about particular sorts of breached boundaries that confuse a specific historiral people's stories about what counts as distinet categories crucial to that culture's natural-technicai evolutionary narratives. Mixotricho is a pro at transgrrssing just those sorts of boundaries. Like the other entities in this foreword, "Mixotricha could not cohabit the The Cyborg Hondbook world without all of the materializing instruments, discourses, and political economies of transnational technoscience-from scanning electron microscopes, to molecular genetic analysis, to theories of evolution, to c!rculations of money and people. Appropriately, Lyn, Margulis, the University of Massachusetts biologist who introduced me to Miixotricha's genre-confounding talents, is also one of the formulators of the Gaia hypothesis. The account of the nature of life hy her and her
son is a riche exposilion of the travails of the auto-poietic earth (M.1argulis and Sagan 1994). These writers cross-stitch technology, organic beings, and inorganic nature into a cobbled together, profoundly materialist and dynamic biosphere. Their techno-biosphere is a kind of cyborg coyote or trickster, not an innocent being, not in our control, but not out of our control either (our practices matter and the cyborg is our flesh too), and in whom we are fatefully embedded, along with the multi-talented prokaryotes and odd protoctists that they deseribe so lavishly. They refuse both technological determinisrn, whether of a cultural-industrial or biological-genetic sort, and back-to-nature mysticism. Margulis and Sagan's What Is Life? is anemic, for my taste, in its account of the flows of capital and questions of politics and cultural specificity in the whole eartr 's story, mueh less in any sense of crittque of the mechanisms of "planetary metabolism" that capitalism
and technoscience have become ' Yet, What Is Life? is full of ways to avoid the traps in the tradition of Western natural history and its conjoined twin called political theory of methodolo5ical individualism: humanist arrogance; demonology of the machine, and boring certainties that we already know everything. The argu ments that machines are indissociable human extensions (an extended phenotype), coupled with the insistence on the intimate joins of matter and feeling, consciousness and history, are all persuasive to me, who, it must be said, has long been a believer on these issues. Mar ulis and Sagan provide an historical narrative with a future that is full of metamorphoses, but without apocalypses."Our" bodies are indeed weedy and promiscuous, and the earth has always been going to seed.

M. paradoxa is a particularly apt resident of this version of the whole earth. Using Lynn Margulis and Dorion Sagan's earlier book, Origins of Sex: Three Billion Years of Genetic Recombination, as my guide, I will close with a story of the promiscuous origins of cells that have organelles, in order to explore what counts as a unit, as one, in a promising, non-innocent Gaian-cyborg natural history practice. Cells with organelles are called "eukaryotes"; they have a membrane-bound nucleus and other differentiated internal struetures. "Prokaryotes" like bacteria, do not have a nucleus to house their genetic material, but keep their DNA naked in the cell. Consider, then, the text given us by the existence, in the hindgut of a modern South Australiari termite, of the creature named Mixotricha parodoxa, a mixed-up, paradoxical, microscopic bit of "hair" (trichos). This little filamentous creature makes a mockery of the notion of the bounded, defended, singular self out to protect its genetic investments. The problem our text presents is simple: what constitutes M.
parodoxa? Where does the protist stop and somebody else start irr that wood-eating insect's teeming hindgut? In the five-kingdom elassification of life, a protist is a member of the Protoctista, which is made up of "mieroorganisms and their larger deseendants composed of multiple heterologous genomes" [Margulis 1992:40). Not belonging to the plant, animal, fungus, or bacterial kingdoms, but constituting a kingdom of their own, protoctists inelude algae, slime molds, ciliates, and amoebae, among many others The "multiple heterologous genomes are the source of my pleasure in these abundant and baroquely elaborated beings' Plants, animals, and fungi all descended from such be5innings What does Mixotrichas paradoxical individuality tell us about beginnings? Finally, how might such forms of life help us addlress the tendentious qucstiois broached at the beginning of this foreword? :
parvdoxo is a nucleated microbe with five distinet kinds of internal and external proiary,otic symbionts, ineludírg two speeies of motile spirochetes, which live in various degrees ofstruetural 2nd funetional integration with their host. About one million 'individuals" of the five kinds of prokaryotes Ii\,e with, on, and in the nucleated being that gets the generic name Mixotricha. The substantive seems to imply an individualitý, a basis for the name, that must make any serious cosmic nominalist orgasmic. When the congeries reach a couple of million, the host divides; and then there are two-or some power of ten of two. All the associated creatures live in a kind of obligate confederaey. Opportunists all, they are nested in each others tissúes in a mýriad of ways that make words Iike competition and cooperation, or individual and collective, fall into the trash he2p of p2llid metaphors and bad ontology. From Margulis and Sagan's "symbiogenetic" point of view, Mixotrichás kind of coñfederacy is fundamental to life's history. Such associations probably arose repe2tedly. The ties often involved genetic exehanges, or recombinations, that in turn had a history dating back to the earliest bacteria that had to survive the gene-damag-
ing environment of ultra-violet light before there was an oxygen atmosphere to shield them. "That genetic recombination began as a part of an enormous health delivery system to ancient DNA molecules is quite evident. Once healthy recombinants were produced, they retained the ability to recombine genes from different sources. As long as selection acted on the reeombinants, selectiori pressure would retain the mechanism of reeombination as well. I like the idea of gene exehange as a kind of prophylaxis against sunburn. It puts the heliotropic West into perspective. Protists like M. paradoxa seem to show ín mid-stream the ubiquitous, life-changing association of events that brought motile, oxygen-using, or photosynthetic bacteria into other cells, perhaps originally on an opportunistic hunt for a nutritious meal or a secure medium for their metabolic transactions. Sonle predators settled down inside their prey and struck up quite an energy and information-exehange economy. Mitochondria, oxygen-using organelles with respiratory enzymes integrated into membrane structures, probably joined what are now modern cells in this way. "With the elapse of time, the internal enemies of the prey evolved into microbial guests, and, finally, supportive adopted relatives. Because of a wealth of molecular biological and biochemical evidence supporting these models, the mitochondria of today are best seen as descendants of cells that evolved within other cells".
The story of heterogeneous associations at various levels of integration repeated - itself many times at many scales. "Clones of eukaryotic cells ín the form of animals, plants, fungi, and protoctists seem Co ;hare a symbiotic history.... From an evolutionary point of view, the first eukary, tes were loose confederacies of bacteria that, with con Cinuing integration, became recognizable as protists, unicellular eukaryotic cells... The earliest protists were likely to have been most like barterial communities.... At first each autopoietic [self-maintaining] community member replicated its DNA, divided, and remained in contac: with other members in a fairly informal manner. Informal here refers to the number of partners in these confederacies: they varied". Indeed, they varied. And this kind of variation relies on a different
narative structure from the Terminator's endless repetitions. Mixotricha is a logo for a very weedy version of Gaia, where-e the monocultures of transnational
agribusiness and the heavily capitalized rush to convert biodiversity into biotechnology for sale runs Into at least a narrative. Undoubtedly, we will have to do more than mutate the stories and the figures if the Cyborg citizens of the third planet from the sun are to enjoy something better than the deadly transgressive flexibility of the New World Order. I Iike to tell stories, and I
regard biology as a branch of civics. I know that I am in a long tradition of natural historians, as well as laboratory scientists, in this pursuit. I also know that my stories, as well as those of my willing and unwilling scientist informants, are exeruciatingly historically and culrurally specific, whether acknowledged as such or not. And, naturally, my stories are all true, or at least they aim to be and in several dimensions at once. My hope is that this kind of truth is situated and accountable, and therefore able to be in power-sensitive engagement with other versions and materializations of the world. My stories are not impartial; they are for some ways of life and not others. I think that characteristic puts my account right in the middle of technosci-
entific practice in general. Fact and fiction, rhetoric and technology, and analysis and story-telling are all held together by a stronger weld than those who esehew taking narrative practice seriously in scienee-and in all other sorts of "hard" explanation-will allow. Even so, mutating the stories is part of a much bigger task of engaging the apparatuses for producing what will count as "global" and as "us." I do not think that most people whó live on earth now have the ehoice not to live inside of, and not to be shaped by, the fiercely material and imaginative apparatuses for making "us" cyborgs and making our homes into places mapped within the space of titanic globalizations in a direct line of descent from the cybernetic Gaia seen from NASA's fabulous eyes. The global and the universal are not pre-existing empirical qualities; they are deeply fraught,
dangerous, and inescapable inventions. The cyborg is a figure for exploring those inventions, whom they serve, how they can be reconfigured Cyborgs do not stay still. Already in the few decades that they have existed, they have mutated, in fact and fiction, into second-order entities like genomic
and electronic databases and the other denizens of the zone Called Cyberspace. Lives are at stake in curious quasi-objects like databases; they structure the informatics of possible worlds, as well as of all-too-real ones. Whether our attention, and our aetion, is addressed to labor systems, sexual configurations, circuits of disease and well-being, banking wizardry, trajectories of food and the means to get it, politìcal organizing, religious visions, virtual realities and time-space compressions symbolized by the internet, racial formations, reality or the Reality Engine", serious business or world-shaping play,
cyborg figures have a way of transfecting, infecting, everything. This Handbook is a valuable guide to the cyborg worlds we willy-nilly inhabit, whether we want to or not. I think The Handbook is one instrument for achieving what Elizabeth Bird, on the staff of the Center for Rural Affairs in Nebraska, called for in her slogan:
Cyborgs for Earthly Survival!