Haraway_CyborgManifesto.html

03 Oct 09

Ms Galbreath

Cyborg - feminism

feminism cyborg haraway culture technology

01 Oct 09

Hilde Corneliussen

cyborg feminism gender haraway theory manifesto

30 Sep 09

Elisabeth Nesheim

Donna Haraway's referenced manifest describing the hybrid between man and machine, the Cyborg and uses this metaphor to discuss gender in terms of cultural constructions, (dis)connection to the body and identiy.

cyborg body hybrid gender constructionism feminism cybernetic computer man ManMachine

am making an argument
for the cyborg as a fiction mapping our social and bodily reality and as
an imaginative resource suggesting some very fruitful couplings
Identities seem contradictory, partial,
and strategic. With the hard-won recognition of their social and historical
constitution, gender, race, and class cannot provide the basis for belief
in 'essential' unity. There is nothing about teeing 'female' that naturally
binds women
6 more annotations...
- not even such a state as 'being' female,
- created by
  
  157
  
  mechanisms inducing affinity
- These sociobiological
  stories depend on a high-tech view of the body as a biotic component or
  cybernetic communications system.
- take intense pleasure in machines, and then with excuses
  that this was organic activity after all, appropriate to females.
- Our bodies, ourselves; bodies are maps of power
  and identity. Cyborgs are no exception
- Intense pleasure
  in skill, machine skill, ceases to be a sin, but an aspect of embodiment.
  The machine is not an it to be animated, worshipped, and dominated. The
  machine is us, our processes, an aspect of our embodiment.

23 Jul 09

Clarence P

30 May 09

Jay Bee

Donna Haraway, "A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century," in Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (New York; Routledge, 1991), pp.149-181.

feminism gender technocapitalism inclusion PhD

Irony is about contradictions
that do not resolve into larger wholes, even dialectically, about the tension
of holding incompatible things together because both or all are necessary
and true. Irony is about humour and serious play. It is also a rhetorical
strategy and a political method, one I would like to see more honoured within
socialist-feminism.
A cyborg is a cybernetic organism, a hybrid of machine and organism,
a creature of social reality as well as a creature of fiction. Social reality
is lived social relations, our most important political construction, a
world-changing fiction. The international women's movements have constructed
'women's experience', as well as uncovered or discovered this crucial collective
object. This experience is a fiction and fact of the most crucial, political
kind. Liberation rests on the construction of the consciousness, the imaginative
apprehension, of oppression, and so of possibility. The cyborg is a matter
of fiction and lived experience that changes what counts as women's experience
in the late twentieth century. This is a struggle over life and death, but
the boundary between science fiction and social reality is an optical illusion.
23 more annotations...
- Modern medicine is also full of cyborgs, of couplings between organism
  and machine
- Modern production seems like a dream
  of cyborg colonization work
- And modern war is a cyborg orgy
- I am making an argument
  for the cyborg as a fiction mapping our social and bodily reality and as
  an imaginative resource suggesting some very fruitful couplings. Michael
  Foucault's biopolitics is a flaccid premonition of cyborg politics, a very
  open field.
- In the
  traditions of 'Western' science and politics--the tradition of racist, male-dominant
  capitalism; the tradition of progress; the tradition of the appropriation
  of nature as resource for the productions of culture; the tradition of reproduction
  of the self from the reflections of the other - the relation between organism
  and machine has been a border war. The stakes in the border war have been
  the territories of production, reproduction, and imagination. This chapter
  is an argument for pleasure in the confusion of boundaries and for responsibility
  in their construction. It is also an effort to contribute to socialist-feminist
  culture and theory in a postmodernist, non-naturalist mode and in the utopian
  tradition of imagining a world without gender, which is perhaps a world
  without genesis, but maybe also a world without end.
- The cyborg is resolutely committed to partiality, irony, intimacy, and
  perversity. It is oppositional, utopian, and completely without innocence.
  No longer structured by the polarity of public and private, the cyborg defines
  a technological polls based partly on a revolution of social relations in
  the oikos, the household. Nature and culture are reworked; the one can no
  longer be the resource for appropriation or incorporation by the other.
  The rela-tionships for forming wholes from parts, including those of polarity
  and hierarchical domination, are at issue in the cyborg world. Unlike the
  hopes of Frankenstein's monster, the cyborg does not expect its father to
  save it through a restoration of the garden; that is, through the fabrication
  of a heterosexual mate, through its completion in a finished whole, a city
  and cosmos. The eyborg does not dream of community on the model of the organic
  family, this time without the oedipal project. The cyborg would not recognize
  the Garden of Eden; it is not made of mud and cannot dream of returning
  to dust. Perhaps that is why I want to see if eyborgs can subvert the apocalypse
  of returning to nuclear dust in the manic compulsion to name the Enemy.
- Cyborgs are not reverent; they do not re-member the cosmos. They are wary
  of holism, but needy for connection- they seem to have a natural feel for
  united front politics, but without the vanguard party. The main trouble
  with cyborgs, of course, is that they are the illegitimate offspring of
  militarism and patriarchal capitalism, not to mention state socialism. But
  illegitimate offspring are often exceedingly unfaithful to their origins.
  Their fathers, after all, are inessential.
- So my cyborg myth is about transgressed boundaries, potent fusions, and
  dangerous possibilities which progressive people might explore as one part
  of needed political work. One of my premises is that most American socialists
  and feminists see deepened dualisms of mind and body, animal and machine,
  idealism and materialism in the social practices, symbolic formula-tions,
  and physical artefacts associated with 'high technology' and scientific
  culture. From One-DimensionalMan (Marcuse, 1964) to The Death of Nature
  (Merchant, 1980), the analytic resources developed by progressives have
  insisted on the necessary domination of technics and recalled us to an imagined
  organic body to integrate our resistance. Another of my premises is that
  the need for unity of people trying to resist world-wide intensification
  of domination has never been more acute. But a slightly perverse shift of
  perspective might better enable us to contest for meanings, as well as for
  other forms of power and pleasure in technologically mediated societies.
- From one perspective, a cyborg world is about the final imposition of
  a grid of control on the planet, about the final abstraction embodied in
  a Star Wars apocalypse waged in the name of defence, about the final appropriation
  of women's bodies in a masculinist orgy of war (Sofia, 1984). From another
  perspective, a cyborg world might be about lived social and bodily realities
  in which people are not afraid of their joint kinship with animals and machines,
  not afraid of permanently partial identities and contradictory standpoints.
  The political struggle is to see from both perspectives at once because
  each reveals both dominations and possibilities unimaginable from the other
  vantage point. Single vision produces worse illusions than double vision
  or many-headed monsters.
- committed to building a political form
  that acutally manages to hold together witches, engineers, elders, perverts,
  Christians, mothers, and Leninists long enough to disarm the state.
- It has become difficult to name one's feminism by a single adjective
  -- or even to insist in every circumstance upon the noun. Consciousness
  of exclusion through naming is acute. Identities seem contradictory, partial,
  and strategic. With the hard-won recognition of their social and historical
  constitution, gender, race, and class cannot provide the basis for belief
  in 'essential' unity. There is nothing about teeing 'female' that naturally
  binds women. There is not even such a state as 'being' female, itself a
  highly complex category constructed in contested sexual scientific discourses
  and other social practices.
- The recent history
  for much of the US left and US feminism has been a response to this kind
  of crisis by endless splitting and searches for a new essential unity. But
  there has also been a growing recognition of another response through coalition
  - affinity, not identity.
- The theoretical and practical struggle against unity-through-domination
  or unity-through-incorporation ironically not only undermines the justifica-tions
  for patriarchy, colonialism, humanism, positivism, essentialism, scient-ism,
  and other unlamented -isms, but all claims for an organic or natural standpoint.
  I think that radical and socialist/Marxist-feminisms have also undermined
  their/our own epistemological strategies and that this is a crucially valuable
  step in imagining possible unities. It remains to be seen whether all 'epistemologies'
  as Western political people have known them fail us in the task to build
  effective affinities.
- What kind of politics could embrace partial, contradictory, permanently
  unclosed constructions of personal and collective selves and still be faithful,
  effective - and, ironically, socialist-feminist?
- None of 'us'
  have any longer the symbolic or material capability of dictating the shape
  of reality to any of'them'. Or at least 'we' cannot claim innocence from
  practicing such dominations. White women, including socialist feminists,
  discovered (that is, were forced kicking and screaming to notice) the non-innocence
  of the category 'woman'. That consciousness changes the geography of all
  previous categories; it denatures them as heat denatures a fragile protein.
  Cyborg feminists have to argue that 'we' do not want any more natural matrix
  of unity and that no construction is whole.
- The main achievement of both
  Marxist feminists and socialist feminists was to expand the category of
  labour to accommodate what (some) women did, even when the wage relation
  was subordinated to a more comprehensive view of labour under capitalist
  patriarchy.
- THE INFORMATICS OF DOMINATION
  
  In this attempt at an epistemological and political position, I would
  like to sketch a picture of possible unity, a picture indebted to socialist
  and feminist principles of design. The frame for my sketch is set by the
  extent and importance of rearrangements in world-wide social relations tied
  to science and technology. I argue for a politics rooted in claims about
  fundamental changes in the nature of class, race, and gender in an emerging
  system of world order analogous in its novelty and scope to that created
  by industrial capitalism; we are living through a movement from an organic,
  industrial society to a polymorphous, information system--from all work
  to all play, a deadly game. Simultaneously material and ideological, the
  dichotomies may be expressed in the following chart of transitions from
  the comfortable old hierarchical dominations to the scary new networks I
  have called the informatics of domination:
- Representation
  Simulation
  Bourgeois novel, realism
  Science fiction, postmodernism
  Organism
  Biotic Component
  Depth, integrity
  Surface, boundary
  Heat
  Noise
  Biology as clinical practice
  Biology as inscription
  Physiology
  Communications engineering
  Small group
  Subsystem
  Perfection
  Optimization
  Eugenics
  Population Control
  Decadence, Magic Mountain
  Obsolescence, Future Shock
  Hygiene
  Stress Management
  Microbiology, tuberculosis
  Immunology, AIDS
  Organic division of labour
  Ergonomics/cybernetics of labour
  Functional specialization
  Modular construction
  Reproduction
  Replication
  Organic sex role specialization
  Optimal genetic strategies
  Bioogical determinism
  Evolutionary inertia, constraints
  Community ecology
  Ecosystem
  Racial chain of being
  Neo-imperialism, United Nations humanism
  Scientific management in home/factory
  Global factory/Electronid cottage
  Family/Market/Factory
  Women in the Integrated Circuit
  Family wage
  Comparable worth
  Public/Private
  Cyborg citizenship
  Nature/Culture
  fields of difference
  Co-operation
  Communicatins enhancemenet
  Freud
  Lacan
  Sex
  Genetic engineering
  labour
  Robotics
  Mind
  Artificial Intelligence
  Second World War
  Star Wars
  White Capitalist Patriarchy
  Informatics of Domination
- One important route for reconstructing socialist-feminist
  politics is through theory and practice addressed to the social relations
  of science and technology, including crucially the systems of myth and meanings
  structuring our imaginations. The cyborg is a kind of disassembled and reassembled,
  postmodern collective and personal self. This is the self feminists must
  code.
- Communications technologies and biotechnologies are the crucial tools
  recrafting our bodies. These tools embody and enforce new social relations
  for women world-wide. Technologies and scientific discourses can be partially
  understood as formalizations, i.e., as frozen moments, of the fluid social
  interactions constituting them, but they should also be viewed as instruments
  for enforcing meanings. The boundary is permeable between tool and myth,
  instrument and concept, historical systems of social relations and historical
  anatomies of possible bodies, including objects of knowledge. Indeed, myth
  and tool mutually constitute each other.
- I want to conclude with a myth about idendty and boundaries which might
  inform late twentieth-century political imaginations (Plate 1). I am indebted
  in this story to writers like Joanna Russ, Samuel R. Delany, John Varley,
  James Tiptree, Jr, Octavia Butler, Monique Wittig, and Vonda McIntyre.23
  These are our story-tellers exploring what it means to be embodied in high-tech
  worlds. They are theorists for cyborgs. Exploring concephons of bodily boundaries
  and social order, the anthropologist Mary Douglas (1966, 1970) should be
  credited with helping us to consciousness about how fundamental body imagery
  is to world view, and so to political language.
  
  French feminists like Luce Irigaray and Monique Wittig, for all their
  differences, know how to write the body; how to weave eroticism, cosmology,
  and politics from imagery of embodiment, and especially for Wittig, from
  imagery of fragmentation and reconstitution of bodies.24
  
  American radical feminists like Susan Griffnn, Audre Lorde, and Adrienne
  Rich have profoundly affected our political imaginations - and perhaps restricted
  too much what we allow as a friendly body and political language.25 They
  insist on the organic, opposing it to the technological. But their symbolic
  systems and the related positions of ecofeminism and feminist paganism,
  replete with organicisms, can only be understood in Sandoval's terms as
  oppositional ideologies fitting the late twentieth century.
- 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.
- Writing is pre-eminently the technology of cyborgs, etched surfaces of
  the late twentieth century. 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. These are the couplings
  which make Man and Woman so problematic, subverting the structure of desire,
  the force imagined to generate language and gender, and so subverting the
  structure and modes of reproduction of 'Western' idendty, of nature and
  culture, of mirror and eye, slave and master, body and mind. 'We' did not
  originally choose to be cyborgs, but choice grounds a liberal politics and
  epistemology that imagines the reproduction of individuals before the wider
  replications of 'texts'.

12 May 09

James Schirmer

feminism technology theory culture gender philosophy science Politics identity

12 Apr 09

Matt Davis

the metaphor C31
ethical perplexity
48 more annotations...
- copies without originals
- simulacra
- women in the integrated
  circuit
- Gordon intends 'homework economy' to name a restructuring
  of work that broadly has the characteristics formerly ascribed to female
  jobs
- Work is being redefined as both
  literally female and feminized
- To be
  feminized means to be made extremely vulnerable
- The homework economy as a world capitalist organizational structure is
  made possible by (not caused by) the new technologies
- also related to the
  collapsing welfare state and the ensuing intensification of demands on women
  to sustain daily life
- feminization of poverty
- Within the framework of three major stages of capitalism (commercial/
  early industrial, monopoly, multinational) --tied to nationalism, imperialism,
  and multinationalism, and related to Jameson's three dominant aesthetic
  periods of realism, modernism, and postmodernism --I would argue that specific
  forms of families dialectically relate to forms of capital and to its political
  and cultural concomitants
- (1) the patriarchal
  nuclear family
- (2) the modern family mediated (or enforced)
  by the welfare state
- (3) the
  'family' of the homework economy
- . It is no longer
  a secret that sexuality, reproduction, family, and community life are interwoven
  with this economic structure in myriad ways which have also differentiated
  the situations of white and black women
- militarization
- A major social and political
  danger is the formation of a strongly bimodal social structure, with the
  masses of women and men of all ethnic groups, but especially people of colour,
  confined to a homework economy, illiteracy of several varieties, and general
  redundancy and impotence, controlled by high-tech repressive apparatuses
  ranging from entertainment to surveillance and disappearance.
- What kind of constitutive role in the production
  of knowledge, imagination, and practice can new groups doing science have?
- network ideological image
- trace one vision of women's 'place' in the integrated circuit
- Home, Market, Paid Work Place, State,
  School, Clinic-Hospital, and Church
- ever, there is no 'place' for women in these networks,
  only geometries of difference and contradiction crucial to women's cyborg
  identities
- dispersion
- Home:
- Market:
- Paid Work Place:
- State:
- School:
- Clinic-hospital:
- Church:
- The only way to characterize the informatics of domination is as a massive
  intensification of insecurity and cultural impoverishment
- Perhaps,
  ironically, we can learn from our fusions with animals and machines how
  not to be Man, the embodiment of Western logos
- constructions
  of women of colour and monstrous selves in feminist science fiction.
- 'women of colour' might be understood as a cyborg
  idendty, a potent subjecdvity synthesized from fusions of outsider identities
  and in the complex political-historical layerings
- Sister Outsider
- Writing has a special significance for all colonized groups.
  Writing has been crucial to the Western myth of the distinction between
  oral and written cultures, primitive and civilized mentalities
- Releasing the play of writing is deadly serious
- 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
- Feminist cyborg
  stories have the task of recoding communication and intelligence to subvert
  command and control.
- Sister Outsider hints at the possibility of world survival not
  because of her innocence, but because of her ability to live on the boundaries,
  to write without the founding myth of original wholeness
- Writing is pre-eminently the technology of cyborgs
- to recognize 'oneself' as fully implicated in the world, frees us of the
  need to root politics in identification, vanguard parties, purity, and mothering.
- Every, story that begins with original innocence and privileges the return
  to wholeness imagines the drama of life to be individuation, separation,
  the birth of the self, the tragedy of autonomy, the fall into writing, alienation
- Chief among
  these troubling dualisms are self/other, mind/body, culture/nature, male/female,
  civilized/primitive, reality/appearance, whole/part, agent/resource, maker/
  made, active/passive, right/wrong, truth/illusion, totaVpartial, God/man
- The self is the One who is not dominated, who knows that by the semice of
  the other, the other is the one who holds the future, who knows that by
  the experience of domination, which gives the lie to the autonomy of the
  self. To be One is to be autonomous, to be powerful, to be God; but to be
  One is to be an illusion, and so to be involved in a dialectic of apocalypse
  with the other
- There is no fundamental, ontological
  separation in our formal knowledge of machine and organism, of technical
  and organic
- Monsters have always defined the limits of community in Western imaginations
- We are responsible for
  boundaries
- Race, gender, and capital require a cyborg theory
  of wholes and parts. There is no drive in cyborgs to produce total theory

04 Apr 09

Shanta Rohse

donna_haraway gender_&_technology feminism metaphors anthropology manifesto delicious_import

24 Mar 09

George Roberts

And another classic read

feminism cyborg culture technology haraway theory gender

19 Mar 09

Michael Weller

25 Feb 09

Yann Leroux

cyborg feminism culture technology theory gender history

22 Jan 09

Dorota Tylus

literature books technology culture gender digital_culture

08 Jan 09

Adam Bohannon

cyborg feminism haraway technology culture theory gender posthumanism

26 Sep 08

oiwan lam

A cyborg is a cybernetic organism, a hybrid of machine and organism,
a creature of social reality as well as a creature of fiction.
The cyborg is a matter
of fiction and lived experience that changes what counts as women's experience
in the late twentieth century.
18 more annotations...
- Movements
  for animal rights are not irrational denials of human uniqueness; they are
  a clear-sighted recognition of connection across the discredited breach
  of nature and culture.
- Our machines are disturbingly lively,
  and we ourselves frighteningly inert.
- transgressed boundaries, potent fusions, and
  dangerous possibilities
- a cyborg world might be about lived social and bodily realities
  in which people are not afraid of their joint kinship with animals and machines,
  not afraid of permanently partial identities and contradictory standpoints.
- Gender, race, or class consciousness is an achievement
  forced on us by the terrible historica experience of the contradictory social
  realities of patriarchy, colonialism, and capitalism.
- Painful fragmentation among feminists (not to mention
  among women) along every possible fault line has made the concept of woman
  elusive, an excuse for the matrix of women's dominations of each other.
- affinity, not identity
- oppositional
  consciousness
- Cyborg feminists have to argue that 'we' do not want any more natural matrix
  of unity and that no construction is whole.
- feminists' consciousness
  of the non-existence of women, except as products of men's desire.
- 'homework economy'
- (1) the patriarchal
  nuclear family, structured by the dichotomy between public and private and
  accompanied by the white bourgeois ideology of separate spheres and nineteenth-century
  Anglo-American bourgeois feminism; (2) the modern family mediated (or enforced)
  by the welfare state and institutions like the family wage, with a flowering
  of a-feminist heterosexual ideologies, including their radical versions
  represented in Greenwich Village around the First World War; and (3) the
  'family' of the homework economy with its oxymoronic structure of women-headed
  households and its explosion of feminisms and the paradoxical intensification
  and erosion of gender itself.
- The new communications
  technologies are fundamental to the eradication of 'public life' for everyone.
- weaving
- Feminist cyborg
  stories have the task of recoding communication and intelligence to subvert
  command and control.
- 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.
- liminal transformation
- hese real-life cyborgs (for example, the Southeast
  Asian village women workers inJapanese and US electronics firms described
  by Aihwa Ong) are actively rewriting the texts of their bodies and sociedes.

06 Sep 08

gumgum van HK

studies gender

blasphemy

03 Sep 08

Claire Fontaine

So my cyborg myth is about transgressed boundaries, potent fusions, and
dangerous possibilities which progressive people might explore as one part
of needed political work. One of my premises is that most American socialists
and feminists see deepened dualisms of mind and body, animal and machine,
idealism and materialism in the social practices, symbolic formula-tions,
and physical artefacts associated with 'high technology' and scientific
culture. From One-DimensionalMan (Marcuse, 1964) to The Death of Nature
(Merchant, 1980), the analytic resources developed by progressives have
insisted on the necessary domination of technics and recalled us to an imagined
organic body to integrate our resistance. Another of my premises is that
the need for unity of people trying to resist world-wide intensification
of domination has never been more acute. But a slightly perverse shift of
perspective might better enable us to contest for meanings, as well as for
other forms of power and pleasure in technologically mediated societies.
Chela Sandoval (n.d., 1984), from a consideration of specific historical
moments in the formation of the new political voice called women of colour,
has theorized a hopeful model of political identity called 'oppositional
consciousness', born of the skills for reading webs of power by those refused
stable membership in the social categories of race, sex, or class.
9 more annotations...
- historically constituted body
- historically constituted body.
- Abstraction and illusion rule in knowledge, domination rules in practice.
- 'Advanced capitalism'
- Lacan
- 'homework economy'.
- 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.
- All the characters explore the limits of language; the dream of communicating
  experience; and the necessity of limitation, partiality, and indmacy even
  in this world of protean transformation and connection. Superluminal
- This is a dream not
  of a common language, but of a powerful infidel heteroglossia. It is an
  imagination of a feminist speaking in tongues to strike fear into the circuits
  of the supersavers of the new right. It means both building and destroying
  machines, identities, categories, relationships, space stories. Though both
  are bound in the spiral dance, I would rather be a cyborg than a goddess.

01 Sep 08

Lori Emerson

postmodernism cyborg feminism haraway technology theory culture

01 Aug 08

interstices

donnaharaway feminism antiessentialism posthuman theory

16 Jun 08

Rudy Garns

"A cyborg is a cybernetic organism, a hybrid of machine and organism, a creature of social reality as well as a creature of fiction. Social reality is lived social relations, our most important political construction, a world-changing fiction. The international women's movements have constructed 'women's experience', as well as uncovered or discovered this crucial collective object. This experience is a fiction and fact of the most crucial, political kind. Liberation rests on the construction of the consciousness, the imaginative apprehension, of oppression, and so of possibility. The cyborg is a matter of fiction and lived experience that changes what counts as women's experience in the late twentieth century. This is a struggle over life and death, but the boundary between science fiction and social reality is an optical illusion." Originally "A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century," in Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (New York; Routledge, 1991), pp.149-181.

cyborgs feminism haraway culture technology AZB

02 Jun 08

Alissa Mello

Performance Studies Feminism

149-181

21 May 08

katarina peovic

Donna Haraway, "A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century," in Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (New York; Routledge, 1991), pp.149-181.

cyborg feminism ZTK haraway

26 Mar 08

H Tillberg Webb

cyborg educational_technology for:cpwebb philosophy_of_technology

12 Mar 08

gen

cyborg feminism haraway manifesto

20 Feb 08

rhetorx

cyborg haraway

26 Sep 07

Lorem ipsum

technology history cyberculture article cyborg

20 Sep 07

annafil

A cyborg is a cybernetic organism, a hybrid of machine and organism,
a creature of social reality as well as a creature of fiction. Social reality
is lived social relations, our most important political construction, a
world-changing fiction.
The cyborg is a creature in a post-gender world; it has no truck with
bisexuality, pre-oedipal symbiosis, unalienated labour, or other seductions
to organic wholeness through a final appropriation of all the powers of
the parts into a higher unity. In a sense, the cyborg has no origin story
in the Western sense - a 'final' irony since the cyborg is also the awful
apocalyptic telos of the

151

'West's' escalating dominations of abstract individuation, an ultimate
self untied at last from all dependency, a man in space. An origin story
in the 'Western', humanist sense depends on the myth of original unity,
fullness, bliss and terror, represented by the phallic mother from whom
all humans must separate, the task of individual development and of history,
the twin potent myths inscribed most powerfully for us in psychoanalysis
and Marxism.

23 May 07

sdesaille

cyborgs feminism scitech_studies theorists_haraway

30 Mar 07

jamie allen

cyborg feminism technology culture haraway theory gender grad media Philosophy performingTechnology

05 Feb 07

Tamas Kemenczy

quickd

A cyborg is a cybernetic organism, a hybrid of machine and organism,
a creature of social reality as well as a creature of fiction. Social reality
is lived social relations, our most important political construction, a
world-changing fiction.
Communications technologies depend
on electronics. Modern states, multinational corporations, military power,
welfare state apparatuses, satellite systems, political processes, fabrication
of our imaginations, labour-control systems, medical construc-tions of our
bodies, commercial pornography, the international division of labour, and
religious evangelism depend intimately upon electronics. Micro-electronics
is the technical basis of simulacra; that is, of copies without originals.
17 more annotations...
- Work is being redefined as both
  literally female and feminized, whether performed by men or women. To be
  feminized means to be made extremely vulnerable; able to be disassembled,
  reassembled, exploited as a reserve labour force; seen less as workers than
  as servers; subjected to dme arrangements on and off the paid job that make
  a mockery of a limited work day; leading an existence that always borders
  on being obscene, out of place, and reducible to sex.
- The main trouble
  with cyborgs, of course, is that they are the illegitimate offspring of
  militarism and patriarchal capitalism, not to mention state socialism. But
  illegitimate offspring are often exceedingly unfaithful to their origins.
  Their fathers, after all, are inessential.
- Biology and evolutionary theory over the last two
  centuries have simultaneously produced modern organisms as objects of knowledge
  and reduced the line between humans and animals to a faint trace re-etched
  in ideological struggle or professional disputes between life and social
  science. Within this framework, teaching modern Christian creationism should
  be fought as a form of child abuse.
- Modern medicine is also full of cyborgs, of couplings between organism
  and machine, each conceived as coded devices, in an intimacy and with a
  power that was not generated in the history of sexuality.
- Miniaturization has turned out to be about power;
  small is not so much beautiful as pre-eminently dangerous, as in cruise
  missiles.
- The new technologies seem deeply involved in the forms of'privatization'
  that Ros Petchesky (1981) has analysed, in which militarization, right-wing
  family ideologies and policies, and intensified definitions of corporate
  (and state) property as private synergistically interact.18 The new communications
  technologies are fundamental to the eradication of 'public life' for everyone.
  This facilitates the mushrooming of a permanent high-tech military establishment
  at the cultural and economic expense of most people, but especially of women.
- From another
  perspective, a cyborg world might be about lived social and bodily realities
  in which people are not afraid of their joint kinship with animals and machines,
  not afraid of permanently partial identities and contradictory standpoints.
- The recent history
  for much of the US left and US feminism has been a response to this kind
  of crisis by endless splitting and searches for a new essential unity. But
  there has also been a growing recognition of another response through coalition
  - affinity, not identity.
- Labour is the pre-eminently privileged category enabling the Marxist to
  overcome illusion and find that point of view which is necessary for changing
  the world. Labour is the humanizing activity that makes man; labour is an
  ontological category permitting the knowledge of a subject, and so the knowledge
  of subjugation and alienation.
- MacKinnon argues that feminism necessarily adopted a different analyt-ical
  strategy from Marxism, looking first not at the structure of class, but
  at the structure of sex/gender and its generative relationship, men's constitu-tion
  and appropriation of women sexually. Ironically, MacKinnon's 'ontology'
  constructs a non-subject, a non-being. Another's desire, not the self's
  labour, is the origin of 'woman'. She therefore develops a theory of consciousness
  that enforces what can count as 'women's' experience - anything that names
  sexual violation, indeed, sex itself as far as 'women' can be concerned.
  Feminist practice is the construction of this form of consciousness; that
  is, the self-knowledge of a self-who-is-not.
- But sexual object)fication,
  not alienation, is the consequence of the structure of sex/gender. In the
  realm of knowledge, the result of sexual objectification is illusion and
  abstraction. However, a woman is not simply alienated from her product,
  but in a deep sense does not exist as a subject, or even potential subject,
  since she owes her existence as a woman to sexual appropriation. To be constituted
  by another's desire is not the same thing as to be alienated in the violent
  separation of the labourer from his product.
- Representation
  Simulation
  Bourgeois novel, realism
  Science fiction, postmodernism
  Organism
  Biotic Component
  Depth, integrity
  Surface, boundary
  Heat
  Noise
  Biology as clinical practice
  Biology as inscription
  Physiology
  Communications engineering
  Small group
  Subsystem
  Perfection
  Optimization
  Eugenics
  Population Control
  Decadence, Magic Mountain
  Obsolescence, Future Shock
  Hygiene
  Stress Management
  Microbiology, tuberculosis
  Immunology, AIDS
  Organic division of labour
  Ergonomics/cybernetics of labour
  Functional specialization
  Modular construction
  Reproduction
  Replication
  Organic sex role specialization
  Optimal genetic strategies
  Bioogical determinism
  Evolutionary inertia, constraints
  Community ecology
  Ecosystem
  Racial chain of being
  Neo-imperialism, United Nations humanism
  Scientific management in home/factory
  Global factory/Electronid cottage
  Family/Market/Factory
  Women in the Integrated Circuit
  Family wage
  Comparable worth
  Public/Private
  Cyborg citizenship
  Nature/Culture
  fields of difference
  Co-operation
  Communicatins enhancemenet
  Freud
  Lacan
  Sex
  Genetic engineering
  labour
  Robotics
  Mind
  Artificial Intelligence
  Second World War
  Star Wars
  White Capitalist Patriarchy
  Informatics of Domination
- Human beings,
  like any other component or subsystem, must be localized in a system architecture
  whose basic modes of operation are probabilistic, statistical. No objects,
  spaces, or bodies are sacred in themselves; any component can be interfaced
  with any other if the proper standard, the proper code, can be constructed
  for processing signals in a common language. Exchange in this world transcends
  the universal translation effected by capitalist markets that Marx analysed
  so well.
- Furthermore, communications sciences and modern biologies are constructed
  by a common move - the translation of the world into a problem of coding,
  a search for a common language in which all resistance to instrumental control
  disappears and all heterogeneity can be submitted to disassembly, reassembly,
  investment, and exchange.
- n communications sciences, the translation of the world into a problem
  in coding can be illustrated by looking at cybernetic (feedback-controlled)
  systems theories applied to telephone technology, computer design, weapons
  deployment, or data base construction and maintenance. In each case, solution
  to the key questions rests on a theory of language and control; the key
  operation is determining the rates, directions, and probabilities of flow
  of a quantity called information. The world is subdivided by boundaries
  differentially permeable to information. Information is just that kind of
  quantifiable element (unit, basis of unity) which allows universal translation,
  and so unhindered instrumental power (called effective communication). The
  biggest threat to such power is interruption of communication. Any system
  breakdown is a function of stress. The fundamentals of this technology can
  be condensed into the metaphor C31, command-controlcommunication-intelligence,
  the military's symbol for its operations theory.
- The culture of
  video games is heavily orientated to individual compedtion and extraterrestrial
  warfare
- One important route for reconstructing socialist-feminist
  politics is through theory and practice addressed to the social relations
  of science and technology, including crucially the systems of myth and meanings
  structuring our imaginations. The cyborg is a kind of disassembled and reassembled,
  postmodern collective and personal self. This is the self feminists must
  code.