I find it suggestive that the social theories of Haraway and (the imagined) Clark are both so entwined with Marx’s ideas. Being a bit of a Marxist social theorist myself, I take umbrage at the lately-fashionable statement that “Marxism is dead.” It is a comforting sort of revelation to see visions of forward-looking, technological, cyborg theories that take on the gaps and blindnesses of Marxist theory, and suggest a way in which the discourse is not dead, just awaiting reawakening in a changed form.
Both theorists are trying to address the crippling alienation that industrial society creates in interposing between a human being, his/her labor, and the products of that labor; and both see immense healing and productive power in breaking down the thin boundary that separates human and machine. Clark realizes that the human-machine interface, as it has been developed since the Industrial Revolution, is destructive to the human because it is external: productive actions are mediated through a computer separate from the body, and the human is disempowered—his/her labor is de-skilled, and his/her vitality is sucked away. Clark/Soquet’s futurist, cyborg solution to concrete, real problems highlighted by Marxist theory bears a strong similarity to Haraway’s investigation of possibilities of resistance through cyborg culture. She considers similar problems of alienation, de-skilling, “feminization,” disempowerment.
“It is not clear who makes and who is made in the relation between human and machine,” Haraway writes on page 29 of her essay (right half of pdf page 15), which seems to be both problem and solution in one. Such a lack of clarity alienates only if the individual is ontologically required to be organic. Clark and Haraway claim that embracing this ambiguity of high-tech culture through a (literal or figurative) cyborg existence is vital for undoing the alienation of labor.
No comments:
Post a Comment