“Cyborg Dreams” by Jeffrey A. Bennett: Summary and Critique

Introduction: “Cyborg Dreams” by Jeffrey A. Bennett

Table of Contents

“Cyborg Dreams” by Jeffrey A. Bennett first appeared in 2019 as Chapter 6 of his book Managing Diabetes: The Cultural Politics of Disease, published by NYU Press. In this chapter, Bennett examines the Smithsonian’s “Birth of Biotech” exhibit, particularly its framing of recombinant insulin as both a scientific triumph and a symbol of American progress. By analyzing the use of a child’s image alongside biotechnology, he shows how cultural memory, nationalism, and capitalism are intertwined in the representation of medical innovation. Drawing on Donna Haraway’s “cyborg manifesto,” Bennett situates diabetes management technologies—such as insulin pumps, continuous glucose monitors, and artificial pancreas prototypes—as extensions of the human body that blur the boundaries between organism and machine. He highlights how these devices create a “cyborg consciousness” in which survival depends on technological integration, yet also exposes patients to corporate exploitation, rising costs, and the burden of constant self-surveillance. The chapter is significant for literature and literary theory because it extends cyborg theory beyond science fiction into lived medical practices, illustrating how metaphors like “progress,” “purity,” and “miracle” shape illness narratives and public discourse. Bennett’s work underscores the importance of reading medical technologies as cultural texts that reveal the biopolitical dynamics of hope, risk, and consumerism.

Summary of “Cyborg Dreams” by Jeffrey A. Bennett

✺🌸 Birth of Biotech, Memory, and “Progress” (Bennett, 2019)

Reads the Smithsonian’s 2013 “Birth of Biotech” exhibit as a national myth that sacralizes recombinant insulin as American ingenuity while sidelining public institutions and complexities of risk.
The child-with-syringe image sutures care, futurity, and capitalism—suggesting a seamless path from lab to self-care even though the photo predates recombinant insulin.

Key move: exposes how “progress” functions as a god-term organizing memory and policy talk, pairing hope with unease.
“Progress…won the day,” yet the display “quietly underscores” anxiety and omission (Bennett, 2019).

✺🌼 Cyborg Manifestations: Bodies-Machines Informatics (Bennett, 2019)

Mobilizes Haraway to show everyday diabetes management as cyborg life: pumps/CGMs make the body–machine boundary porous and data-saturated.

Diabetes subjects become experts performing continuous self-surveillance in and beyond the clinic.
Quote (via Haraway, as cited by Bennett): “we are all chimeras… hybrids of machine and organism” (Bennett, 2019).
Literary payoff: the “cyborg” shifts from sci-fi trope to analytic for lived embodiment, discourse, and power.

✺🌷 Insulin’s “Miracle” and Its Lexicon of Risk (Bennett, 2019)

Insulin’s 1922 debut reframed narratives from fatalism to manageability, but also spawned a grammar of routine, vigilance, and new dangers (e.g., hypoglycemia).
Public euphoria eclipsed hesitations—insulin as a “precious but flawed miracle” (Bennett, 2019).

Management discourse mixes agency (“activated patient”) with ever-present uncertainty.

✺🌺 From Animal to “Human” Insulin: Technobiopower & Marketing (Bennett, 2019)

Recombinant “human” insulin celebrated as purification and abundance, yet initially no clear health superiority over porcine/bovine forms; it narrowed consumer choice and intensified hypoglycemia for many.
Bennett tracks a shift from patient to consumer, where adopting the “new” becomes moralized (“living in the past”).

“Technobiopower” names the nexus of surveillance, individualized responsibility, and market expansion (Bennett, 2019).
Ad rhetoric manufactures urgency: “He’s four years old. And already he’s living in the past” (Bennett, 2019).

✺🌻 Pumps, CGMs, and the Hybrid Loop: Promise with Discipline (Bennett, 2019)

Pumps offer granular dosing and mobility; CGMs heighten temporal awareness—yet both demand relentless testing, calibration, site changes, and alarm management.
Hybrid closed-loop systems automate more tasks but still require carb entry and vigilance—producing the feeling of “unconscious control” without relinquishing labor.
Community voices reveal ambivalence: “I do not want to be a walking cyborg” (Bennett, 2019).

Clinicians worry about over-reliance; users worry about cost, reliability, sleep disruption, privacy, and DKA risk.

✺🌹 Evergreening, Price Spikes, and the Cost of Being Ill (Bennett, 2019)

Insulin prices soared; patent “evergreening” sustains profits and blocks true generics, forcing trade-offs (medicine vs. mortgage).

Bennett reframes insulin from “Lazarus effect” to hostage economy—patients conscripted into choice architectures designed by oligopolies.
Quote: companies price insulin by “the value” it brings—Bennett shows how such value talk masks engineered scarcity (Bennett, 2019).
Activist lexicon (“evergreening,” “single-payer”) becomes rhetorical equipment for reform.

✺🌼 Literary/Theoretical Stakes: Metaphor, Narrative, Biopolitics (Bennett, 2019)

Tracks how tropes—progress, purity, miracle, fatalism, agency—organize museum labels, ads, policy, and patient forums.

Argues for reading devices and data as cultural texts: narratives of ease conceal labor; “epidemic” can mobilize resources and stigmatize.
Quote: tropes are “places where you trip… breakdowns… are creative” (Bennett, 2019).
Contribution: a method for situating illness narratives in political economy—extending cyborg/disability rhetoric into chronic-care infrastructures.

✺🌸 Conclusion: Cyborg Hopes, Collective Futures (Bennett, 2019)

Technology widens horizons but without structural change reproduces inequity; activism must target markets and policy, not just devices.
Calls for shifting from individualized “activated patient” myths to community-centered health imaginaries.
Change is incremental but possible when lived experience and critical vocabulary circulate together.

Theoretical Terms/Concepts in “Cyborg Dreams” by Jeffrey A. Bennett

🌸 Theoretical Term / Concept 🌸	🌼 Example from Cyborg Dreams 🌼	🌺 Explanation 🌺
🌷 Cyborg Manifesto (Donna Haraway) 🌷	Bennett cites Haraway’s claim that “we are all chimeras… hybrids of machine and organism,” applying it to insulin pumps and continuous glucose monitors.	Diabetes technologies illustrate Haraway’s cyborg heuristic, blurring human/machine boundaries. Patients live as cyborgs, dependent on devices for survival.
🌹 Technobiopower 🌹	Recombinant “human” insulin marketed as superior though not always medically better; patients pressured into adopting it to avoid “living in the past.”	Bennett adapts Foucault’s biopower: technologies both sustain life and discipline patients, binding them to surveillance, market logics, and consumer subjectivity.
🌻 God Term: Progress 🌻	Smithsonian’s “Birth of Biotech” exhibit consecrates recombinant insulin as national “progress,” pairing child’s image with biotech machinery.	Following Richard Weaver, Bennett shows “progress” as America’s god term—structuring memory, obscuring risks, and legitimizing corporate capitalism.
🌸 Fatalism vs. Agentic Subject 🌸	Humulin ad: “He’s four years old. And already he’s living in the past.”	Fatalism frames older therapies as dangerous; the “agentic patient” trope insists on constant vigilance, creating moral pressure to adopt new technologies.
🌼 Tropes and Tropological Tripping 🌼	Haraway: “Tropes are places where you trip… breakdowns… are creative.” Bennett notes CGM malfunctions or insulin price hikes as such “trippings.”	Tropes like “miracle,” “purity,” or “progress” carry contradictions. Failures expose fissures, opening spaces for critique, resistance, and new meaning-making.
🌺 Miracle / Precious but Flawed Miracle 🌺	Discovery of insulin in 1922 hailed as miraculous, yet created new risks (hypoglycemia, strict routines).	Insulin transformed lives but introduced new disciplines. Bennett shows miracles as culturally constructed, simultaneously redemptive and burdensome.
🌷 Evergreening 🌷	Corporations extend patents by tweaking insulin formulas, blocking generics; Humulin marketed as “living in the future.”	A capitalist strategy of innovation without novelty. Patients are trapped in cycles of dependence, framed as choice, while corporations profit.
🌹 Unconscious Control Fantasy 🌹	Hybrid closed-loop systems advertised as effortless, yet require carb entry, calibration, vigilance.	A recurring fantasy in medical rhetoric: technology will manage the body “automatically.” In practice, labor intensifies, sustaining the myth of ease.
🌻 Surveillance & Datafication 🌻	Pumps and CGMs produce endless data streams; patients must monitor, calibrate, and adjust constantly.	Medical devices enact surveillance biopolitics, producing subjects who internalize responsibility and normalize corporate capture of health data.
🌸 Child-as-Metonym 🌸	Smithsonian exhibit photo of a boy injecting insulin; Eli Lilly ad with child framed as “living in the past.”	Children embody futurity and national hope; their images sacralize technology while masking timelines, risks, and market exploitation.

Contribution of “Cyborg Dreams” by Jeffrey A. Bennett to Literary Theory/Theories

🌸 Posthumanism / Cyborg Theory
- Extends Haraway’s claim that “we are all chimeras… hybrids of machine and organism” by grounding it in everyday diabetes tech (pumps, CGMs), showing the lived cyborg beyond sci-fi (Bennett, “Cyborg Dreams”).Reframes the human–machine boundary as a chronic, routine dependency (“life apart from these technologies is inconceivable”) to theorize the mundane posthuman (Bennett).
- Uses museum display and advertising to show how cyborg embodiment is culturally authorized and sentimentalized via the child’s body (Bennett).

🌺 Biopolitics / (Techno)biopower
- Coins and operationalizes a diabetes-specific “technobiopower”: devices sustain life and conscript subjects into surveillance, self-discipline, and market routines (Bennett).Demonstrates how algorithmic care and datafication relocate clinical power into domestic time (“constant vigilance,” calibration), extending biopower into intimate rhythms (Bennett).
- Quote: insulin becomes a “precious but flawed miracle,” revealing power/knowledge’s ambivalence (Bennett).

🌷 Rhetorical Theory / Tropology
- Models “tropological tripping” (after Haraway) as a critical method: where “breakdowns” in tech rhetoric (CGM lag, pump failures, cost spikes) open analytic leverage (Bennett).
- Dissects god-terms (“progress”) that organize museum memory and erase risk (“The Birth of Biotech”) (Bennett).
- Shows how tropes—miracle, purity, progress, futurity—naturalize corporate aims while scripting patient conduct (Bennett).
- Quote: tropes are “places where you trip… breakdowns… are creative” (Bennett quoting Haraway).
🌼 Narrative Theory / Medical Humanities
- Tracks genre shifts from fatalism → “happily-ever-after” cure tales post-1922, exposing how miracle narratives mask labor and risk (Bennett).Reads ad copy (“He’s four years old. And already he’s living in the past.”) as a conversion narrative that manufactures the future-oriented consumer subject (Bennett).
- Repositions chronic illness stories as time-disciplining plots (meals, alarms, calibrations), complicating “ease of management” scripts (Bennett).
🌹 Memory Studies / Museum & Display Theory
- Close-reads the Smithsonian exhibit’s juxtaposition (boy + biotech machinery) to theorize mnemoscapes that retroactively produce cause-and-effect myths (Bennett).
- Shows how national memory consecrates biotech as American exceptionalism, suturing scientific “progress” to civic futurity (Bennett).
- Quote: exhibits foster “faith… in technological advancements” even as “risk murmurs throughout” (Bennett).

🌻 Science & Technology Studies (STS) / Sociology of Expectations
- Situates recombinant insulin and hybrid closed-loop systems in an “economy of promise,” where hype (“game changer”) coexists with user labor (carb entry, finger-sticks) (Bennett).
- Analyzes failure, lag, and calibration as socio-technical frictions, not bugs, revealing the labor of making technologies “work” (Bennett).
- Maps platformization of care (cloud CGM) and emergent data governance questions (Bennett).
🌸 Disability Studies / Critical Medical Ethics
- Rejects a nostalgic “natural” body by showing that for many, the “natural state” is lethal; technology is access and survival (Bennett).
- Exposes intra-community moralism (Type 1 vs. Type 2 shaming) as ableist discipline reproduced by techno-rhetorics of responsibility (Bennett).
- Centers affordability as an accessibility axis: price renders tech “out of reach,” reframing cure/management as a justice problem (Bennett).
🌺 Political Economy / Marxist Cultural Critique
- Names insulin evergreening as accumulation strategy: “innovation without novelty” that blocks generics and manufactures scarcity (Bennett).
- Reads Humulin’s marketing and synchronized price hikes as ideological practices that convert dependency into brand loyalty (Bennett).
- Quote: users feel firms are “holding my kid ransom,” translating exploitation into a potent cultural metaphor (Bennett).

🌷 Affect Theory
- Tracks ambivalence—hope, dread, vigilance, shame—as the affective atmosphere of chronic care under technocapitalism (Bennett).
- Museum awe, ad tenderness, alarm fatigue, cost anxiety: affect is how power adheres to bodies and decisions (Bennett).
- Quote: “enthusiasm marks the public transcript… the hidden transcript is often one of suspicion” (Bennett).
🌼 Semiotics / Visual Culture
- Interprets the child-as-metonym (exhibit photo, Humulin ad) as a sign for national futurity that legitimates biotech and obscures timelines (Bennett).
- Unpacks color/placement (BW child vs. colorful machine) as semiotic cues staging progress, purity, and causality (Bennett).
🌹 Ethics of Care / Communitarian Theory
- Shifts from the atomized “agentic subject” to communal frames—advocacy, regulation, universal access—arguing care is infrastructural, not merely individual virtue (Bennett).
- Proposes linguistic resources (“evergreening,” “single-payer”) as public tools to re-narrate obligations (Bennett).

Examples of Critiques Through “Cyborg Dreams” by Jeffrey A. Bennett

🌸 Literary Work 🌸	🌺 Critique Through Cyborg Dreams 🌺	🌻 Reference from Bennett 🌻
🌷 Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein 🌷	Shelley’s creature anticipates the “cyborg” as an assemblage of flesh and technology. Through Bennett’s lens, Frankenstein illustrates how cultural anxieties around science mirror contemporary fears of recombinant insulin and hybrid closed-loop systems. Both narratives link “progress” to unease.	Bennett critiques the Smithsonian’s Birth of Biotech exhibit, noting how the child with syringe enshrines “progress” while muting risk—similar to how Frankenstein’s monster embodies both promise and dread (Bennett, Cyborg Dreams).
🌹 Donna Haraway’s A Cyborg Manifesto 🌹	While Haraway theorizes the cyborg abstractly, Bennett grounds it in chronic illness. Literary critics can use his extension to rethink Haraway’s claims in terms of lived embodiment, showing how technologies like insulin pumps produce “cyborg consciousness” as an everyday condition.	“We are all chimeras… hybrids of machine and organism” (Haraway, cited in Bennett). Bennett reworks this as materialized in diabetes management.
🌻 Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World 🌻	Huxley’s dystopia commodifies life through pharmaceuticals. Bennett’s account of “evergreening” and insulin pricing parallels this, exposing how markets conscript patients into consumption cycles. Both texts critique how corporate logics redefine what it means to live.	Bennett: companies price insulin based on “the value it brings,” turning survival into hostage economics (Bennett, Cyborg Dreams).
🌸 Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go 🌸	Ishiguro’s clones live as biomedical resources; their lives are structured by care systems that sustain yet exploit them. Bennett’s concept of “technobiopower” illuminates this paradox—where bodies are both preserved and disciplined by medical innovation.	Bennett: recombinant insulin narrowed choice and bound patients to market logics, illustrating how technobiopower manages life while reducing agency (Bennett, Cyborg Dreams).

Criticism Against “Cyborg Dreams” by Jeffrey A. Bennett

· 🌸 Overreliance on Haraway’s Framework

Critics may argue that Bennett leans too heavily on Donna Haraway’s Cyborg Manifesto, using it more as a metaphorical anchor than interrogating its limits.
By foregrounding Haraway, other posthumanist or disability-centered frameworks may be sidelined.

· 🌺 Technological Determinism Risk

The chapter sometimes frames pumps, CGMs, and hybrid closed-loop systems as almost inevitable extensions of the body.
This could underplay patient resistance, alternative care practices, or communities that reject such integration.

· 🌻 Limited Patient Voices

While Bennett cites community discussions and ads, the dominant lens is rhetorical analysis of institutions (Smithsonian, Eli Lilly).

Critics may claim that the actual lived narratives of diverse diabetic patients (race, class, global South contexts) remain underrepresented.

· 🌷 Focus on U.S.-Centric Contexts

The analysis centers primarily on American biotech, museums, and pharmaceutical markets.
This could be seen as limiting the universality of “cyborg” politics in chronic illness management.

· 🌹 Ambivalence on Agency

Bennett critiques the “activated patient” trope, yet at times reproduces the idea of patients as passive recipients of technobiopower.
A critic might ask: where is the space for patient creativity, refusal, or collective resistance?

· 🌼 Economic Analysis Not Fully Developed

While “evergreening” and insulin pricing are addressed, the critique of pharmaceutical capitalism might appear descriptive rather than deeply theorized through Marxist or political economy traditions.

· 🌸 Museum and Ad Rhetoric as Over-Determined

Some may find Bennett’s close readings of museum exhibits and advertisements compelling but overly speculative, assigning ideological weight that the curators or designers may not have consciously intended.

· 🌺 Insufficient Engagement with Disability Studies

Though Bennett gestures toward disability politics, critics might note that the chapter does not fully integrate insights from disability activism and scholarship, especially regarding autonomy, access, and justice.

Representative Quotations from “Cyborg Dreams” by Jeffrey A. Bennett with Explanation

🌼 Quotation	What Bennett is doing / why it matters
✨ “Diabetes is a chronic condition, one marked by its relationship to time (chronos), and technology functions to alleviate the unknowns that dwell in one’s future.”	Frames diabetes through temporality: devices (pumps, CGMs, artificial pancreas) promise to manage uncertainty over time, linking care to futurity and risk.
🌸 “In Haraway’s words, ‘we are all chimeras, theorized and fabricated hybrids of machine and organism; in short, we are cyborgs. The cyborg is our ontology; it gives us our politics.’”	Imports Haraway to ground a posthuman reading of diabetes tech—situating patients within machine–organism hybrids and opening political questions about bodies and care.
🌺 “To separate the person with diabetes from modern medical innovations is to invite their demise.”	Pushes past metaphor: for many, tech isn’t optional but life-sustaining—tightening the ethical stakes of access, affordability, and design.
🌻 “Insulin was a ‘precious but flawed miracle.’”	Complicates triumphal narratives: insulin saves lives yet produces new risks, routines, and dependencies—inviting a more ambivalent history of ‘progress.’
🌷 “[S]uffice it to say for now that a ‘technobiopower’ had emerged in the United States around diabetes technologies.”	Names a power formation where bodies are managed through surveillance, data, and markets—tying clinical life to consumer capitalism.
🌼 “Despite all its advantages, the closed-loop system demands a more activated patient, not one prone to apathy and neglect.”	Counters fantasies of ‘automation’: hybrid systems still require labor, literacy, and vigilance—so technology can intensify, not erase, self-management.
🌹 “I do not want to be a walking cyborg.”	A patient’s refusal captures ambivalence toward embodiment-with-devices, reminding us that ‘cyborg’ is lived, negotiated, and sometimes rejected.
💠 “The once affordable medication climbed 300 percent in less than a decade…”	Pivots from devices to economics: dramatizes the pricing crisis as a political failure with life-or-death consequences.
🌟 “…the revitalization and extension of patents through the practice of ‘evergreening.’”	Gives a critical keyword for advocacy: shows how incremental tweaks sustain monopolies and foreclose generics (‘biosimilars’) in insulin.
🪷 “If only someone listens.”	Ends on a rhetorical plea: centers lived experience as a resource for transforming policy, narratives, and care infrastructures.

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