Cyborg Manifesto, Androgene Impartiality and Impenetrable Intellectual Encoding
Donna Haraway’s “Cyborg Manifesto” attempts to create a unified field theory for poststructuralist, technological era Socialist/Feminism. Haraway uses the metaphor of the Cyborg to remove herself from the constraints of essentialism, which precondition earlier, second wave Socialist/Feminist dialogue and therefore fall into reactionary rather than progressive discourse. The Cyborg context provides Haraway access to the agnosticism of technology toward the constructs of gender, reproduction and the realization of the increasing human dependence on technological prosthesis in every facet of life.
The Cyborg construct is also useful in that it does not spring from typical psychological or pathological origins, but is, to quote the author “oppositional, utopian and completely without innocence.” Cyborgs simply don’t care about the same things that humans do, they are born anew without prejudice and again, as Haraway states “they do not remember the cosmos.”
Haraway’s point is that that Cyborgs lack the same baggage as completely biological beings in that they are not purely one thing or another, and therefore might have less stake in either camp without a tendency towards the dualism of purely human thinkers. Cyborgs unify discourse and negate dualist constructs like the distinctions between mind and body, animal and machine, and idealism and materialism (not to mention male and female). Haraway herself disdains dualism as a simplistic and flawed perspective, and makes a good case for a unified theory that is unified only in it’s acknowledgment of the complicated nature of the cosmos (postmodernism). This is an important point and a clear difference between Haraway and essentialists feminist thinking that pines for a return to a natural state.
Cyborgs are ambiguous, fully integrated with technology, and spawned from the darkest of sources of military industrial science and patriarchal, hierarchical capitalism. Haraway couches this as a good thing by stating ” illegitimate offspring are often exceedingly unfaithful to their origins.” Thinking back to a reading of Bill Joy’s “Why the Future Doesn’t Need Us”, I certainly hope she is correct. In the Joy context, a Cyborg state is the lesser of three very dark predictions for humanitie’s eventual relationship with advanced technology. Joy believes that the convergence of computer intelligence with bio and nanotechnology boil down to three options:
1. Machines eventually competing with humans for resources and winning, and doing away with or eating us. The Terminator story.
2. Machines enslaving humanity toward their own end. The Matrix story.
3. Machines and humans meld together to form Cyborgs. The Star Trek, Borg story.
Cyborgs are naturally, unnatural and comfortable with that fact. Haraway sees this as a characteristic to be emulated in that it negates many of the illusory assumptions that mire human thinking in well worn, endlessly repeating patterns of bias and confusion. Who better to untangle the Gordian knot of entrenched gender issues than a sentient being without the possibility of gender? Humans of both genders are necessarily exempt for the possibility.
While I grasp many of Donna Haraway’s concepts, I know I am missing a lot, because I do not speak the language well enough. Cyborg Mainfesto appears to me a heavily encoded work of theoretical and critical impressions. The work is written in a dense intellectualized style that requires readers to possess (or acquire) an in-depth critical vocabulary and a historical background in post-modern analysis, which is the rationale for this class. This is of course not a problem if the work is targeted at a specific audience, and I believe that it is. However one naïve criticism I have is that Haraway seems to discard clarity as a necessary element of writing, and therefore obscures her points of reference as well as her intellectual threads. A Cyborg would probably encode communication for the intended audience, similar to the practice of porting computer programs written in one programming language to another for use on different hardware. In this way Haraway’s analogy veers from the Cyborg and exhibits intellectual hubris, or at the very least insensitivity.
Cyborg Manifesto’s message is further obscured in that the author’s ideas are arranged in non-linear patterns that are often not directly connected. I refer to this style as literary impressionism because of the author’s practice of starting a train of thought and then abandoning it for other at times, unrelated territory in quick succession. This often happens from sentence to sentence. The author uses intellectual impressions, and historical references like blobs of paint on an impressionist canvas, and while the individual blobs of paint have a meaning on their own, the viewer is required to step back and connect the blobs into the artist’s larger, intended composition. This happens throughout the entire manifesto so I must believe Haraway might be intentionally working in a decentralized, postmodern style to further support her assertions in practice as well as in word.
David "DC" Spensley
September 5, 2005
Critical Theory A - Fall 2005
Paper Assignment #1, Diagnostic Essay
The Cyborg construct is also useful in that it does not spring from typical psychological or pathological origins, but is, to quote the author “oppositional, utopian and completely without innocence.” Cyborgs simply don’t care about the same things that humans do, they are born anew without prejudice and again, as Haraway states “they do not remember the cosmos.”
Haraway’s point is that that Cyborgs lack the same baggage as completely biological beings in that they are not purely one thing or another, and therefore might have less stake in either camp without a tendency towards the dualism of purely human thinkers. Cyborgs unify discourse and negate dualist constructs like the distinctions between mind and body, animal and machine, and idealism and materialism (not to mention male and female). Haraway herself disdains dualism as a simplistic and flawed perspective, and makes a good case for a unified theory that is unified only in it’s acknowledgment of the complicated nature of the cosmos (postmodernism). This is an important point and a clear difference between Haraway and essentialists feminist thinking that pines for a return to a natural state.
Cyborgs are ambiguous, fully integrated with technology, and spawned from the darkest of sources of military industrial science and patriarchal, hierarchical capitalism. Haraway couches this as a good thing by stating ” illegitimate offspring are often exceedingly unfaithful to their origins.” Thinking back to a reading of Bill Joy’s “Why the Future Doesn’t Need Us”, I certainly hope she is correct. In the Joy context, a Cyborg state is the lesser of three very dark predictions for humanitie’s eventual relationship with advanced technology. Joy believes that the convergence of computer intelligence with bio and nanotechnology boil down to three options:
1. Machines eventually competing with humans for resources and winning, and doing away with or eating us. The Terminator story.
2. Machines enslaving humanity toward their own end. The Matrix story.
3. Machines and humans meld together to form Cyborgs. The Star Trek, Borg story.
Cyborgs are naturally, unnatural and comfortable with that fact. Haraway sees this as a characteristic to be emulated in that it negates many of the illusory assumptions that mire human thinking in well worn, endlessly repeating patterns of bias and confusion. Who better to untangle the Gordian knot of entrenched gender issues than a sentient being without the possibility of gender? Humans of both genders are necessarily exempt for the possibility.
While I grasp many of Donna Haraway’s concepts, I know I am missing a lot, because I do not speak the language well enough. Cyborg Mainfesto appears to me a heavily encoded work of theoretical and critical impressions. The work is written in a dense intellectualized style that requires readers to possess (or acquire) an in-depth critical vocabulary and a historical background in post-modern analysis, which is the rationale for this class. This is of course not a problem if the work is targeted at a specific audience, and I believe that it is. However one naïve criticism I have is that Haraway seems to discard clarity as a necessary element of writing, and therefore obscures her points of reference as well as her intellectual threads. A Cyborg would probably encode communication for the intended audience, similar to the practice of porting computer programs written in one programming language to another for use on different hardware. In this way Haraway’s analogy veers from the Cyborg and exhibits intellectual hubris, or at the very least insensitivity.
Cyborg Manifesto’s message is further obscured in that the author’s ideas are arranged in non-linear patterns that are often not directly connected. I refer to this style as literary impressionism because of the author’s practice of starting a train of thought and then abandoning it for other at times, unrelated territory in quick succession. This often happens from sentence to sentence. The author uses intellectual impressions, and historical references like blobs of paint on an impressionist canvas, and while the individual blobs of paint have a meaning on their own, the viewer is required to step back and connect the blobs into the artist’s larger, intended composition. This happens throughout the entire manifesto so I must believe Haraway might be intentionally working in a decentralized, postmodern style to further support her assertions in practice as well as in word.
David "DC" Spensley
September 5, 2005
Critical Theory A - Fall 2005
Paper Assignment #1, Diagnostic Essay
posted by DanCoyote at 7:02 PM
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