Wow. Haraway certainly knows how to pack a punch, if you’ll forgive the expression.
I had trouble following Haraway’s argument as it pertained to feminism. I know it was there, but it seemed as though she was assuming that her point was already self-evident and going from there. I understand the parallels she is drawing between the cyborg world and the feminine world—this lack of the whole, something that instead must be based on intricate webs of meaning and understanding. Calling someone female can be similar to calling a robot a cyborg. Still, understanding this, I felt that there was more underneath this about cyborg-feminism that remained shrouded. I would love to work at this in class and see what we unearth.
I was very intrigued by her two columns (161). A few of the comparisons stuck out to me. One of these was the “antiquated” idea of perfection being replaced by optimization. When I think of optimization, I am transported back into my high school BC Calculus class. Perfection, curiously, although indicating something unattainable by humans, indicates a very human idea. It is a level which all humans can strive for. It is awkward to think of a robot attaining perfection (careful—the robot, not the builder. Indeed, the builder/architect may come very close to their idea of perfection in constructing the robot). Optimization has to do with specific mathematical constraints. There are pure answers. There are caps to optimization. Once something is optimized, it cannot go above and beyond unless changes are made to the system.
Furthermore, I enjoyed the discussion of the concept of coding. What came to mind was web design, and more specifically, web design made simple. There are programs that set up web design so that all one needs to do it just type in what they want to appear, and it will. What is actually happening within the machine are calculations, functions, and re-workings of what is written into a logical code for the computer, and then produced back into something understandable for the website. It’s as if the computer has a secret passage, and outside both entrances stand the two “humans”, unaware of the vast workings within. ~Samantha
Haraway’s “Cyborg Manifesto” was a powerful text for me to read. It was a lot to work through, but very engaging so it didn’t really matter, and by the end I felt intrigued and excited by the little that I got from my first plunge into it. Granted, I am still confused on some of the specifics of the chapter.
“Cyborg imagery can suggest a way out of the maze of dualisms in which we have explained out bodies and out tools to ourselves” (181). These dualisms are held in place by boundaries that have previously been deemed stable and true during the early and middle stages of capitalism (which Haraway so nicely describes in her trajectory of capitalism which includes economics, politics, aesthetics, and family structure). Boundaries divide human and animal, machine and organism, and physical and nonphysical. The rejection of Haraway for universal languages coincides with her emphasis on creating and breaking boundaries. All of this seemed to incorporate a lot of similar ideas to Deleuze’s rhizome, but situated in the even more confusing and overlapping recent decades. The focus of the woman within all of this broadens Haraway’s scope even further grappling with more seemingly distinct separations (gender) but showing how technology and science are beginning to uproot contradictions and constructions of women.
The woman in the integrated circuit of the informatics of domination is broken apart and appears in numerous categories of advanced capitalist societies. I found this section really useful because Haraway used the stylization of the text to mirror the point she wants to make about multiplicities and dispersions. Things surface and resurface again in new places, always connected but not in a hierarchical system; her comments flow between commas and semicolons focusing on no one point in particular and thereby making a unitary self impossible. There is no common language.
In speaking of monsters towards the conclusion, she shows how throughout history various bodily abnormalities and fictitious creatures became the hidden backdrop for science, politics, identity, ideals, etc. In the modern age, Haraway suggests the cyborg as another path that can lead people to new understandings and the necessity for breaking out of dualisms.
Cyborgology by Gray, et al. was much easier and recapped some of Haraway’s point while summarizing the field’s major influences thus far. Not quite as exciting or well written as Haraway’s Manifesto.
I agree with Samantha. Wow. And with Sarah- in that I had immense difficulty in internalizing everything that Haraway was saying, but was nonetheless completely captivated during the hours that I spent working through the text. I was also extremely excited by what I was reading, but am going to need a lot of help from the class in sorting through it all. Haraway employs the cyborg as a metaphor for women. The cyborg defies convention and definition, being something that in definition blurs categorical lines and boundaries- whether it be between animal and human, machine and human, or physical and nonphysical. All binaries must be thrown out the window. The cyborg exists in the breaking down of these boundaries through the emergence of more technologically advanced machines, specifically microelectronic machines. This embodies great messiness- something that women need to recognize as reflective of their own muddled (nonexistant?) identities... Her major assertion warning against the essentialization or universalization of the female experience. Women cannot turn to one thing to find some collective unity or consciousness. The common female identity does not come from the shared experience of being the object of another's desires, including sexual violation and objectification as MacKinnon would have us believe. This CAN NOT be the origin of woman. Haraway claims that there is no origin at all. She equates perceived female innocence with victimhood and then shunts this aside. We were not born in a garden and neither was the cyborg. In feminist writing- we should not be essentializing and searching for original innocence. "Cyborg writing is about the power to survive, not on the basis of original innocence, but on the basis of seizing the tools to mark the world that marked them as other." (175) "Cyborg politics is the struggle for language and the struggle against perfect communication, against the one code that translates all meaning perfectly, the central dogma of phallogocentrism. That is why cyborg politics insist on noise and advocate pollution, rejoicing in the illegitimate fusions of animal and machine." (176)
While Cyborgology was not nearly as riveting as the Cyborg Manifesto- it did serve to clear one major thing up for me. I have been trying to grapple this entire time why we are just now starting to be considered posthuman when so much of these phenomena have been occurring for so long. When considering; "haven't humans always been cyborgs?", the answer is no. "That looks very cyborgian, but this is only possible because of hindsight. Just as ancient humans, once they'd learned to wield the club, could see the tree limb as a tool. Before then it was only a stick" (6) Our awareness of the relationship is what marks this era of posthumanism? maybe? AND I LOVE NEUROMANCER. i had a lot of fun reading it. It is exactly all of the possibilities that we have been considering and it is SO FUN. so awesome.
If there’s one thing that frustrates me, it’s a feminist who insists on retaining the idea of gender. Its probably not surprising, then, that Haraway has for some time been my favorite feminist writer of the modern era. She sums up my thoughts nicely when she notes that “I do not know of any other time in history when there was greater need for political unity to confront effectively the dominations of 'race', 'gender', 'sexuality', and 'class'. I also do not know of any other time when the kind of unity we might help build could have been possible.” (157) The posthuman individual transcends each of these categories, in the sense that it is no longer subject to the unambiguous rule sets that these cast on the individuals they categorize. Race is recast in genomic terms, rendering generalization impossible; gender and sexuality disintegrate into physiological sex and sexual priorities, and class disassociates completely as the static economic strata (maintained through the discriminations justified under humanist self-reference) melt into the level playing field of the neohuman internet.
As a research scientist, it is unbelievably refreshing to read through the parallel lists Haraway sets up to communicate the paradigm shifts into the posthuman world, if only for the exciting moves she makes in terms of language. The transition it marks, from a system where every thought-action must reference (i.e. index) first the individual and then the social contexts of the thinker-actor, to one in which every thought-action is directed solely at the network context of its realization, is quite a profound one. Moreover, the technical language it emphasizes notes explicitly the direction that this move is already taking. With the rising new language of technical science and computing, it is possible to analyze situations without resorting to abstract analogy or individualist interpretation. Achieving ‘perfection’ of a system is an entirely subjective exercise in a humanist sense, yet determining the ‘optimal’ system is a discretely calculable operation (within an appropriate margin of error), and is performable by any entity with access to the proper data sets. This new technical language bypasses the humanist individual, directing itself by design toward a valid network consensus, removing subjectivity and inference/abduction entirely from the computing process.
I should probably also note that I've been more or less perpetually re-reading Neuromancer since seventh grade. Awesome.
Yes, I have to agree Haraway’s “Cyborg Manifesto” was a bit dense to get through. There were moments when I enjoyed how she weaved through the notion that metaphor of the cyborg enables humans to deconstruct the social myths and representations which embody our reality. Yet, I still found myself stumbling about how to really comprehend her text. But on the other hand I do understand that the idea of “female” does not just mean some set of categories that society has placed on the word. Makes me think of the arbitrariness of the sign (Saussure). At least I think I understand her feminist point of view….. ? Anyway, Gray seems to pull all the pieces together and paint a picture of the “cyborg” or who / what is a cyborg. I really liked his point about how even a simple visit to the doctor to get immunized creates a relationship or symbiosis of human and machine. Also, the discussion of the humanity’s shift from relationship with machines to total symbiosis with machines recalled previous readings of Ingold on society and the concept of technology… look forward to tomorrow's discussion to clear the notions in the Haraway's manifesto.
In reading about cyborgs, I had a difficult time with what seemed to me to be an assumption of inevitability. Perri (I think) mentioned in class the idea that the next stage of human evolution would involve a rejection of the physical body, and this was mentioned in "Cyborgology" on page 7: "some people imagine the future as bodiless: either as "brains in a vat" or as somehow downloaded into immortal computers as organic-artificial intelligences." I have a hard time believing we will ever reach that state. Although we might be able to consider ourselves cyborgs (with pacemakers, artificial limbs, or vaccinations, etc) there are still a huge array of diseases we can't cure. Also, especially in our discussion of car crashes last week, I feel as if, no matter how mechanized we make ourselves, there will always be an aspect of us that is fundamentally mortal. I guess I'm just having a hard time rejecting that, overcoming the boundary between human and machine that the articles are trying to discuss.
On another note, I found the mention of the Mark of the Beast to be particularly funny. A recent knitting magazine published a mitten pattern that featured a pocket on the back for a metro-card. Soon after, a discussion erupted online claiming that the pattern signified the Mark of the Beast. I just thought this was kind of funny/interesting because clearly the Bible makes no mention of implanted computer chips etc yet people are so almost obsessed with the idea of cyborgs that it's immediately jumped to.
Reading "Cyborg Manifesto" was so empowering. I like the idea of being a cyborg by being a woman who doesn't adhere to rules. I found it to be an important metaphor not just for women but for oppressed people everywhere. It reminded me of an essay I read once called "Oppression" by Marilyn Frye. In it she describes women as oppressed for the following reason, "Something pressed is something caught between or among forces and barriers which are so related to each other that jointly they restrain, restrict or prevent the things motion or mobility.Mold.Immobilize.Reduce. Some of these forces that join together to form a no win situation for women were things that women are typically scrutinized for, like working/not working, married/not married, children/no children, etc... Anyway, I want to share more but I will save some for class so no one loses their sight staring at the computer screen!
First, Haraway's text is the first this semester I have felt not only wholly intrigued but which has also left me feeling empowered by the 'posthuman-cyborg' condition, as opposed to some iniquitous feeling of latent dread (who are we, what am I, where is the person). Its poetic approach made it a joy to read, even if at the expense of some general cohesiveness, and perhaps of making the presentation of ideas more complex than it needed to be. Then again, the complexity of the definitions and presentation can be seen as an excellent method of practicing what you preach. Haraway illustrates her points of boundaries and the Western/anthropological[/Capitalist/masculine] love of definition and compartmentalization of knowledge/the world with the same desire for security in awareness executed with a fluid, almost whimsical language. It is, however, an analytic whimsy. Rather than imposing semiotic absolutes on the world, she encourages the dissolution of absolutes with a sensical substitute.
However, I remain somewhat tentative over the feminist dynamic, so far as I would prefer to edit over the term 'feminism' altogether and substitute something more gender-neutral, as I feel fits perfectly into Haraway's convention of re-realizing the self in 'fractured identities'. The principle of feminism itself is already abstracted, and fools itself if it presumes to be all-accessible or all-encompassing in any one definition/name. As a note, Ryder's post reassured me that it is possible to read this text as a male without feeling denied membership to the cyborgian rectification of self-identification. Nitpicking away, however, I wonder whether even this restructuring of gender-necessity (or rather lack thereof) could lead to over-generalization of a sort? If you allow everything to have a fluid, organic index/composition, then how can you separate some thing from some other? Though this I suppose is the constant fear, and one reminiscent of the desire to box all knowledge into accesible compartments. It is also somewhat answered by the use of technical-analytic language, which subverts subjectivity in validating the fluid.
A little bit of a rant before I dive into the readings. I’ve been sick since Thursday of last week… nothing serious, just as bad cold, whatever it is that we’ve all been talking about that’s “going around.” I hate being sick, I think more than most people, and having anything wrong with me not only frustrates me but scares the hell out of me. I’m scard of doctors and needles and anything that alters the mechanics of my body. My mom was diagnosed with cancer during my senior year of high school and reflecting time spent watching her physical deterioration (and then, more slowly, her recovery) helped me articulate, for the first time, why illness terrifies me in the way that it does. It’s the sense of violation… that something can creep inside of us, a virus, a disease that literally has the power to destroy pieces that make us functional, from the inside out. More so, however, the physical deterioration came from the chemo and the radiation and I found myself surrounded by people telling me to trust the chemo, trust the radiation, because that’s what was going to cure. No matter how many times I tried to convince myself that that was true, I could not trust it. Who is to trust, really? The weakened physical state denies us of our highest functionality, and ultimately hurts our egos (for better or worse). If our organs, limbs, and so on are so susceptible to harm, are they not just as bad as the “artificial” machine, the man-crafted? Is there any physical thing that is completely unsusceptible to harm? I would argue that there isn’t; what makes the body different is that we cannot clearly assess the inner damage to our bodies if we are sick. I can’t help think that our bodies will ultimately become unimportant, that brain will completely overtake our need for flesh and blood and vital organs. However, we are currently stuck and dependent on those parts of us, and I do not know exactly what to think of their use, and more precisely, their failures to function.
As far as the reading goes, I was fascinated by Haraway’s thoughts on reproduction. It is hard not to draw a line between the production driving the economy (too often read as simply a man’s realm of reproduction) and the reproduction of humans themselves (a fetus inside of, very specifically, a woman). Yet these two realms of production (only deemed separate, but not actually separate) come together in the movement of humanity, towards an accepted cyborg world. Dualisms, argue Haraway, need to be abandoned for they are false representations of the complex, intertwined relationships between what are too often termed oppositions. Beyond the physical, however, it made me think of the construction of language. When something we touch feels too cold, it burns in the same exact way that something hot does, and we describe it as a burning sensation. It seems then, in basic terms, that man is impossibly the opposite of woman, as they equally reproduce the world of the future.
Like some of the other posters, I was really interested by Harraway's columns of hierarchical dominations and informatics of domination on page 161. It was helpful to understand the forces she discusses by examining specifics all across the board. She describes the first column of hierarchical dominations as "comfortable" and "old" and the informatics of domination as "scary new networks." I was surprised to see in the very second row of the list "bourgeois novel, realism" on the left and "science fiction, postmodernism" on the right. Harraway is saying that we are already (in the 1980's) "living through a movement" that includes a transition from the bourgeois novel to science fiction. While she may be talking about what type of book can be used to most accurately reflect society's current intellectual questions, this transition is not something that seems to be evident in the publishing world or the general population of readers. An example of this is that there are barely any classes at Barnard where students can study science fiction (Posthumanism being one of them). So this move that Harraway is observing might also imply that the most relevant literary work is becoming less correlated with the literary work that is typically praised in mainstream publications, by winning awards, etc., and this would have greater implications in itself. It might suggest a split between art that is intellectually provocative/relevant and art that is deemed to be worthy by the general public, although of course the behavior of the general public is being altered by the scary new networks too.
My response rambles on a bit (and is probably brimming with grammatical mistakes), so I apologize:
[In my notes for Haraway's "Cyborg Manifesto", there are multiple places where I highlighted and wrote in the margins, "LATOUR!"]
Reflecting back on Latour's talk two weeks ago, in which he discussed the Frankenstein-ian hybrid -- one between modern society's members and the environment -- it's a wonder that Haraway's work bears such a striking resemblance in only the first three pages.
There are three concepts in Haraway's work that immediately reminded me of Latour's lecture: 1. According to the text, she avidly believes in the concept of the hybrid ("of machine and organism, a creature of social reality as well as a creature of fiction", p.149); this is similar to Latour's discussion of the environment as no longer leading an isolated existence but as inevitably fused with society and its culture. 2. She calls for "pleasure in the confusion of boundaries and for responsibility in their construction." (150) This parallels Latour's proposal at the end of his lecture for an embracing of the environment as it has become irreversibly hybridized with us. 3. She uses the "Frankenstein's monster" in a similar manner as Latour does (this one got me really excited).
---
The impression that Haraway gives of the cyborg as a symbol of "a post-gender world" is fascinating. This piece (as well as the Gray one) really pushes the boundaries of what constitutes uncoupled organism and machine. In my head, this post-gender world can only be reached by having the organism and the machine come across a stage of absolute, symbiotic hybridity, which is achingly difficult to imagine because I don't know if that's even possible or, if it is, how that might be done.
---
In trying to tie this into Gibson's novel: I imagine that the picture of the world that Haraway paints for us ("oppositional, utopian, and completely without innocence", p.151) is exactly that which is painted by Gibson in Neuromancer.
While reading the book I grew more and more baffled because the lexicon of Case and his peers within the sprawl environment is so alienated and different from our own (Gibson seems to have made up an entirely new language for his fictional world, though drawing from words and morphology that exists today). This only goes to show that (ref: Flight of the Conchords) "The Distant Future" and its further developments are going to become more complex as it intertwines with more of "the machine", thus being no more than a complete mystery to us and our (unfreed?) "humanist" minds.
Haraway is my new hero! She’s like a faithful guide, who offers to lead through frightening and murky technological territory. I was particularly struck by her weaving of the Frankenstein metaphor with her unique conception of the cyborg. “Unlike the hopes of Frankenstein’s monster,” she says, “the cyborg does not expect its father to save it through a restoration of the garden.” In contrast to the orphan-rebel image ascribed to Frankenstein, the cyborg becomes “the illegitimate offspring of militarism and patriarchal capitalism.” Through this idea ‘illegitimacy,’ the cyborg is freed (but not wholly) from its shameful circumstances of conception. With the burden a bit lighter, we (because we are cyborgs too), are able to move on to begin to “contest for meanings,” find moments of clarity and perhaps even seek “pleasure in the confusion of boundaries.” We are no longer the hideous half-beefy Schwarzenegger half-indecipherable machine!
As other people have expressed, I found Haraway's argument powerful, persuasive and a bit hard to follow. Her idea of a post-"post" world, beyond the boundaries with which we're used to organizing the world, is so different from anything we've read this semester. Haraway explains that her “cyborg myth is about transgressed boundaries, potent fusions, and dangerous possibilities which progressive people might explore as one part of needed political work” (154). But, like we discussed in class, there is the problem of her dualism-driven attempt to move away from... dualism. I get that she's being ironic, but I'm not sure whether she's illustrating the non-necessity of dualisms or contradicting her own argument. I definitely need to read this article again.
A second important point that Haraway discusses is the issue of shame and guilt surrounding cyborgs. The shame comes from feeling like boundaries have been transgressed - boundaries between what makes a human a human or a something else. I think this very strong sense of boundaries between humans and non-humans (even if those boundaries become impossible to define) accounts for some people's discomfort around people with unusual disabilities. But if there's nothing to transgress, then no harm done - and Haraway's suggestion is to abandon those boundaries and thus any shameful transgressions of them. This weekend I found a first-hand account of someone, arguably a cyborg, read Jean-Dominique Bauby's The Diving Bell and the Butterfly for another course. It's a short novel whose paralyzed author wrote by blinking his left eyelid (the right was sewn shut) to communicate letters. He described clinicians who would pretend to not see him blinking and would thus avoid communicating with him or acknowledging his expressive capacities. One reading of this book could be that Bauby's sudden closeness to a cyborg (he was paralyzed in an accident) and the transgression of boundaries between moving/not moving, speaking/mute, adult/incapacitated and "natural"/mechanically kept alive made people uncomfortable.
16 comments:
Wow. Haraway certainly knows how to pack a punch, if you’ll forgive the expression.
I had trouble following Haraway’s argument as it pertained to feminism. I know it was there, but it seemed as though she was assuming that her point was already self-evident and going from there. I understand the parallels she is drawing between the cyborg world and the feminine world—this lack of the whole, something that instead must be based on intricate webs of meaning and understanding. Calling someone female can be similar to calling a robot a cyborg. Still, understanding this, I felt that there was more underneath this about cyborg-feminism that remained shrouded. I would love to work at this in class and see what we unearth.
I was very intrigued by her two columns (161). A few of the comparisons stuck out to me. One of these was the “antiquated” idea of perfection being replaced by optimization. When I think of optimization, I am transported back into my high school BC Calculus class. Perfection, curiously, although indicating something unattainable by humans, indicates a very human idea. It is a level which all humans can strive for. It is awkward to think of a robot attaining perfection (careful—the robot, not the builder. Indeed, the builder/architect may come very close to their idea of perfection in constructing the robot). Optimization has to do with specific mathematical constraints. There are pure answers. There are caps to optimization. Once something is optimized, it cannot go above and beyond unless changes are made to the system.
Furthermore, I enjoyed the discussion of the concept of coding. What came to mind was web design, and more specifically, web design made simple. There are programs that set up web design so that all one needs to do it just type in what they want to appear, and it will. What is actually happening within the machine are calculations, functions, and re-workings of what is written into a logical code for the computer, and then produced back into something understandable for the website. It’s as if the computer has a secret passage, and outside both entrances stand the two “humans”, unaware of the vast workings within.
~Samantha
Haraway’s “Cyborg Manifesto” was a powerful text for me to read. It was a lot to work through, but very engaging so it didn’t really matter, and by the end I felt intrigued and excited by the little that I got from my first plunge into it. Granted, I am still confused on some of the specifics of the chapter.
“Cyborg imagery can suggest a way out of the maze of dualisms in which we have explained out bodies and out tools to ourselves” (181). These dualisms are held in place by boundaries that have previously been deemed stable and true during the early and middle stages of capitalism (which Haraway so nicely describes in her trajectory of capitalism which includes economics, politics, aesthetics, and family structure). Boundaries divide human and animal, machine and organism, and physical and nonphysical. The rejection of Haraway for universal languages coincides with her emphasis on creating and breaking boundaries. All of this seemed to incorporate a lot of similar ideas to Deleuze’s rhizome, but situated in the even more confusing and overlapping recent decades. The focus of the woman within all of this broadens Haraway’s scope even further grappling with more seemingly distinct separations (gender) but showing how technology and science are beginning to uproot contradictions and constructions of women.
The woman in the integrated circuit of the informatics of domination is broken apart and appears in numerous categories of advanced capitalist societies. I found this section really useful because Haraway used the stylization of the text to mirror the point she wants to make about multiplicities and dispersions. Things surface and resurface again in new places, always connected but not in a hierarchical system; her comments flow between commas and semicolons focusing on no one point in particular and thereby making a unitary self impossible. There is no common language.
In speaking of monsters towards the conclusion, she shows how throughout history various bodily abnormalities and fictitious creatures became the hidden backdrop for science, politics, identity, ideals, etc. In the modern age, Haraway suggests the cyborg as another path that can lead people to new understandings and the necessity for breaking out of dualisms.
Cyborgology by Gray, et al. was much easier and recapped some of Haraway’s point while summarizing the field’s major influences thus far. Not quite as exciting or well written as Haraway’s Manifesto.
I agree with Samantha. Wow.
And with Sarah- in that I had immense difficulty in internalizing everything that Haraway was saying, but was nonetheless completely captivated during the hours that I spent working through the text. I was also extremely excited by what I was reading, but am going to need a lot of help from the class in sorting through it all.
Haraway employs the cyborg as a metaphor for women. The cyborg defies convention and definition, being something that in definition blurs categorical lines and boundaries- whether it be between animal and human, machine and human, or physical and nonphysical. All binaries must be thrown out the window. The cyborg exists in the breaking down of these boundaries through the emergence of more technologically advanced machines, specifically microelectronic machines.
This embodies great messiness- something that women need to recognize as reflective of their own muddled (nonexistant?) identities... Her major assertion warning against the essentialization or universalization of the female experience.
Women cannot turn to one thing to find some collective unity or consciousness. The common female identity does not come from the shared experience of being the object of another's desires, including sexual violation and objectification as MacKinnon would have us believe. This CAN NOT be the origin of woman.
Haraway claims that there is no origin at all. She equates perceived female innocence with victimhood and then shunts this aside. We were not born in a garden and neither was the cyborg. In feminist writing- we should not be essentializing and searching for original innocence. "Cyborg writing is about the power to survive, not on the basis of original innocence, but on the basis of seizing the tools to mark the world that marked them as other." (175)
"Cyborg politics is the struggle for language and the struggle against perfect communication, against the one code that translates all meaning perfectly, the central dogma of phallogocentrism. That is why cyborg politics insist on noise and advocate pollution, rejoicing in the illegitimate fusions of animal and machine." (176)
While Cyborgology was not nearly as riveting as the Cyborg Manifesto- it did serve to clear one major thing up for me. I have been trying to grapple this entire time why we are just now starting to be considered posthuman when so much of these phenomena have been occurring for so long.
When considering; "haven't humans always been cyborgs?", the answer is no. "That looks very cyborgian, but this is only possible because of hindsight. Just as ancient humans, once they'd learned to wield the club, could see the tree limb as a tool. Before then it was only a stick" (6) Our awareness of the relationship is what marks this era of posthumanism? maybe?
AND I LOVE NEUROMANCER. i had a lot of fun reading it. It is exactly all of the possibilities that we have been considering and it is SO FUN. so awesome.
If there’s one thing that frustrates me, it’s a feminist who insists on retaining the idea of gender. Its probably not surprising, then, that Haraway has for some time been my favorite feminist writer of the modern era. She sums up my thoughts nicely when she notes that “I do not know of any other time in history when there was greater need for political unity to confront effectively the dominations of 'race', 'gender', 'sexuality', and 'class'. I also do not know of any other time when the kind of unity we might help build could have been possible.” (157)
The posthuman individual transcends each of these categories, in the sense that it is no longer subject to the unambiguous rule sets that these cast on the individuals they categorize. Race is recast in genomic terms, rendering generalization impossible; gender and sexuality disintegrate into physiological sex and sexual priorities, and class disassociates completely as the static economic strata (maintained through the discriminations justified under humanist self-reference) melt into the level playing field of the neohuman internet.
As a research scientist, it is unbelievably refreshing to read through the parallel lists Haraway sets up to communicate the paradigm shifts into the posthuman world, if only for the exciting moves she makes in terms of language. The transition it marks, from a system where every thought-action must reference (i.e. index) first the individual and then the social contexts of the thinker-actor, to one in which every thought-action is directed solely at the network context of its realization, is quite a profound one. Moreover, the technical language it emphasizes notes explicitly the direction that this move is already taking. With the rising new language of technical science and computing, it is possible to analyze situations without resorting to abstract analogy or individualist interpretation. Achieving ‘perfection’ of a system is an entirely subjective exercise in a humanist sense, yet determining the ‘optimal’ system is a discretely calculable operation (within an appropriate margin of error), and is performable by any entity with access to the proper data sets. This new technical language bypasses the humanist individual, directing itself by design toward a valid network consensus, removing subjectivity and inference/abduction entirely from the computing process.
I should probably also note that I've been more or less perpetually re-reading Neuromancer since seventh grade. Awesome.
Yes, I have to agree Haraway’s “Cyborg Manifesto” was a bit dense to get through. There were moments when I enjoyed how she weaved through the notion that metaphor of the cyborg enables humans to deconstruct the social myths and representations which embody our reality. Yet, I still found myself stumbling about how to really comprehend her text. But on the other hand I do understand that the idea of “female” does not just mean some set of categories that society has placed on the word. Makes me think of the arbitrariness of the sign (Saussure). At least I think I understand her feminist point of view….. ? Anyway, Gray seems to pull all the pieces together and paint a picture of the “cyborg” or who / what is a cyborg. I really liked his point about how even a simple visit to the doctor to get immunized creates a relationship or symbiosis of human and machine. Also, the discussion of the humanity’s shift from relationship with machines to total symbiosis with machines recalled previous readings of Ingold on society and the concept of technology… look forward to tomorrow's discussion to clear the notions in the Haraway's manifesto.
In reading about cyborgs, I had a difficult time with what seemed to me to be an assumption of inevitability. Perri (I think) mentioned in class the idea that the next stage of human evolution would involve a rejection of the physical body, and this was mentioned in "Cyborgology" on page 7: "some people imagine the future as bodiless: either as "brains in a vat" or as somehow downloaded into immortal computers as organic-artificial intelligences." I have a hard time believing we will ever reach that state. Although we might be able to consider ourselves cyborgs (with pacemakers, artificial limbs, or vaccinations, etc) there are still a huge array of diseases we can't cure. Also, especially in our discussion of car crashes last week, I feel as if, no matter how mechanized we make ourselves, there will always be an aspect of us that is fundamentally mortal. I guess I'm just having a hard time rejecting that, overcoming the boundary between human and machine that the articles are trying to discuss.
On another note, I found the mention of the Mark of the Beast to be particularly funny. A recent knitting magazine published a mitten pattern that featured a pocket on the back for a metro-card. Soon after, a discussion erupted online claiming that the pattern signified the Mark of the Beast. I just thought this was kind of funny/interesting because clearly the Bible makes no mention of implanted computer chips etc yet people are so almost obsessed with the idea of cyborgs that it's immediately jumped to.
Reading "Cyborg Manifesto" was so empowering. I like the idea of being a cyborg by being a woman who doesn't adhere to rules. I found it to be an important metaphor not just for women but for oppressed people everywhere. It reminded me of an essay I read once called "Oppression" by Marilyn Frye. In it she describes women as oppressed for the following reason, "Something pressed is something caught between or among forces and barriers which are so related to each other that jointly they restrain, restrict or prevent the things motion or mobility.Mold.Immobilize.Reduce. Some of these forces that join together to form a no win situation for women were things that women are typically scrutinized for, like working/not working, married/not married, children/no children, etc... Anyway, I want to share more but I will save some for class so no one loses their sight staring at the computer screen!
First, Haraway's text is the first this semester I have felt not only wholly intrigued but which has also left me feeling empowered by the 'posthuman-cyborg' condition, as opposed to some iniquitous feeling of latent dread (who are we, what am I, where is the person). Its poetic approach made it a joy to read, even if at the expense of some general cohesiveness, and perhaps of making the presentation of ideas more complex than it needed to be. Then again, the complexity of the definitions and presentation can be seen as an excellent method of practicing what you preach. Haraway illustrates her points of boundaries and the Western/anthropological[/Capitalist/masculine] love of definition and compartmentalization of knowledge/the world with the same desire for security in awareness executed with a fluid, almost whimsical language. It is, however, an analytic whimsy. Rather than imposing semiotic absolutes on the world, she encourages the dissolution of absolutes with a sensical substitute.
However, I remain somewhat tentative over the feminist dynamic, so far as I would prefer to edit over the term 'feminism' altogether and substitute something more gender-neutral, as I feel fits perfectly into Haraway's convention of re-realizing the self in 'fractured identities'. The principle of feminism itself is already abstracted, and fools itself if it presumes to be all-accessible or all-encompassing in any one definition/name. As a note, Ryder's post reassured me that it is possible to read this text as a male without feeling denied membership to the cyborgian rectification of self-identification. Nitpicking away, however, I wonder whether even this restructuring of gender-necessity (or rather lack thereof) could lead to over-generalization of a sort? If you allow everything to have a fluid, organic index/composition, then how can you separate some thing from some other? Though this I suppose is the constant fear, and one reminiscent of the desire to box all knowledge into accesible compartments. It is also somewhat answered by the use of technical-analytic language, which subverts subjectivity in validating the fluid.
A little bit of a rant before I dive into the readings. I’ve been sick since Thursday of last week… nothing serious, just as bad cold, whatever it is that we’ve all been talking about that’s “going around.” I hate being sick, I think more than most people, and having anything wrong with me not only frustrates me but scares the hell out of me. I’m scard of doctors and needles and anything that alters the mechanics of my body. My mom was diagnosed with cancer during my senior year of high school and reflecting time spent watching her physical deterioration (and then, more slowly, her recovery) helped me articulate, for the first time, why illness terrifies me in the way that it does. It’s the sense of violation… that something can creep inside of us, a virus, a disease that literally has the power to destroy pieces that make us functional, from the inside out. More so, however, the physical deterioration came from the chemo and the radiation and I found myself surrounded by people telling me to trust the chemo, trust the radiation, because that’s what was going to cure. No matter how many times I tried to convince myself that that was true, I could not trust it. Who is to trust, really? The weakened physical state denies us of our highest functionality, and ultimately hurts our egos (for better or worse). If our organs, limbs, and so on are so susceptible to harm, are they not just as bad as the “artificial” machine, the man-crafted? Is there any physical thing that is completely unsusceptible to harm? I would argue that there isn’t; what makes the body different is that we cannot clearly assess the inner damage to our bodies if we are sick. I can’t help think that our bodies will ultimately become unimportant, that brain will completely overtake our need for flesh and blood and vital organs. However, we are currently stuck and dependent on those parts of us, and I do not know exactly what to think of their use, and more precisely, their failures to function.
As far as the reading goes, I was fascinated by Haraway’s thoughts on reproduction. It is hard not to draw a line between the production driving the economy (too often read as simply a man’s realm of reproduction) and the reproduction of humans themselves (a fetus inside of, very specifically, a woman). Yet these two realms of production (only deemed separate, but not actually separate) come together in the movement of humanity, towards an accepted cyborg world. Dualisms, argue Haraway, need to be abandoned for they are false representations of the complex, intertwined relationships between what are too often termed oppositions. Beyond the physical, however, it made me think of the construction of language. When something we touch feels too cold, it burns in the same exact way that something hot does, and we describe it as a burning sensation. It seems then, in basic terms, that man is impossibly the opposite of woman, as they equally reproduce the world of the future.
Mostly... I'm angry at the cyborg and I'm not sure that's allowed.
Like some of the other posters, I was really interested by Harraway's columns of hierarchical dominations and informatics of domination on page 161. It was helpful to understand the forces she discusses by examining specifics all across the board. She describes the first column of hierarchical dominations as "comfortable" and "old" and the informatics of domination as "scary new networks." I was surprised to see in the very second row of the list "bourgeois novel, realism" on the left and "science fiction, postmodernism" on the right. Harraway is saying that we are already (in the 1980's) "living through a movement" that includes a transition from the bourgeois novel to science fiction. While she may be talking about what type of book can be used to most accurately reflect society's current intellectual questions, this transition is not something that seems to be evident in the publishing world or the general population of readers. An example of this is that there are barely any classes at Barnard where students can study science fiction (Posthumanism being one of them). So this move that Harraway is observing might also imply that the most relevant literary work is becoming less correlated with the literary work that is typically praised in mainstream publications, by winning awards, etc., and this would have greater implications in itself. It might suggest a split between art that is intellectually provocative/relevant and art that is deemed to be worthy by the general public, although of course the behavior of the general public is being altered by the scary new networks too.
My response rambles on a bit (and is probably brimming with grammatical mistakes), so I apologize:
[In my notes for Haraway's "Cyborg Manifesto", there are multiple places where I highlighted and wrote in the margins, "LATOUR!"]
Reflecting back on Latour's talk two weeks ago, in which he discussed the Frankenstein-ian hybrid -- one between modern society's members and the environment -- it's a wonder that Haraway's work bears such a striking resemblance in only the first three pages.
There are three concepts in Haraway's work that immediately reminded me of Latour's lecture:
1. According to the text, she avidly believes in the concept of the hybrid ("of machine and organism, a creature of social reality as well as a creature of fiction", p.149); this is similar to Latour's discussion of the environment as no longer leading an isolated existence but as inevitably fused with society and its culture.
2. She calls for "pleasure in the confusion of boundaries and for responsibility in their construction." (150) This parallels Latour's proposal at the end of his lecture for an embracing of the environment as it has become irreversibly hybridized with us.
3. She uses the "Frankenstein's monster" in a similar manner as Latour does (this one got me really excited).
---
The impression that Haraway gives of the cyborg as a symbol of "a post-gender world" is fascinating. This piece (as well as the Gray one) really pushes the boundaries of what constitutes uncoupled organism and machine. In my head, this post-gender world can only be reached by having the organism and the machine come across a stage of absolute, symbiotic hybridity, which is achingly difficult to imagine because I don't know if that's even possible or, if it is, how that might be done.
---
In trying to tie this into Gibson's novel: I imagine that the picture of the world that Haraway paints for us ("oppositional, utopian, and completely without innocence", p.151) is exactly that which is painted by Gibson in Neuromancer.
While reading the book I grew more and more baffled because the lexicon of Case and his peers within the sprawl environment is so alienated and different from our own (Gibson seems to have made up an entirely new language for his fictional world, though drawing from words and morphology that exists today). This only goes to show that (ref: Flight of the Conchords) "The Distant Future" and its further developments are going to become more complex as it intertwines with more of "the machine", thus being no more than a complete mystery to us and our (unfreed?) "humanist" minds.
Haraway is my new hero! She’s like a faithful guide, who offers to lead through frightening and murky technological territory. I was particularly struck by her weaving of the Frankenstein metaphor with her unique conception of the cyborg. “Unlike the hopes of Frankenstein’s monster,” she says, “the cyborg does not expect its father to save it through a restoration of the garden.” In contrast to the orphan-rebel image ascribed to Frankenstein, the cyborg becomes “the illegitimate offspring of militarism and patriarchal capitalism.” Through this idea ‘illegitimacy,’ the cyborg is freed (but not wholly) from its shameful circumstances of conception. With the burden a bit lighter, we (because we are cyborgs too), are able to move on to begin to “contest for meanings,” find moments of clarity and perhaps even seek “pleasure in the confusion of boundaries.” We are no longer the hideous half-beefy Schwarzenegger half-indecipherable machine!
http://www.cnn.com/2008/TECH/space/03/10/space.shuttle.ap/index.html
MASSIVE MONSTER OUTER SPACE ROBOT! AWESOME!
Love, Megan
As other people have expressed, I found Haraway's argument powerful, persuasive and a bit hard to follow. Her idea of a post-"post" world, beyond the boundaries with which we're used to organizing the world, is so different from anything we've read this semester. Haraway explains that her “cyborg myth is about transgressed boundaries, potent fusions, and dangerous possibilities which progressive people might explore as one part of needed political work” (154). But, like we discussed in class, there is the problem of her dualism-driven attempt to move away from... dualism. I get that she's being ironic, but I'm not sure whether she's illustrating the non-necessity of dualisms or contradicting her own argument. I definitely need to read this article again.
A second important point that Haraway discusses is the issue of shame and guilt surrounding cyborgs. The shame comes from feeling like boundaries have been transgressed - boundaries between what makes a human a human or a something else. I think this very strong sense of boundaries between humans and non-humans (even if those boundaries become impossible to define) accounts for some people's discomfort around people with unusual disabilities. But if there's nothing to transgress, then no harm done - and Haraway's suggestion is to abandon those boundaries and thus any shameful transgressions of them. This weekend I found a first-hand account of someone, arguably a cyborg, read Jean-Dominique Bauby's The Diving Bell and the Butterfly for another course. It's a short novel whose paralyzed author wrote by blinking his left eyelid (the right was sewn shut) to communicate letters. He described clinicians who would pretend to not see him blinking and would thus avoid communicating with him or acknowledging his expressive capacities. One reading of this book could be that Bauby's sudden closeness to a cyborg (he was paralyzed in an accident) and the transgression of boundaries between moving/not moving, speaking/mute, adult/incapacitated and "natural"/mechanically kept alive made people uncomfortable.
- hannah schmidt
Post a Comment