Cyborg/BioPolitics, Privacy, and Stress

Haraway acidly calls Foucault’s theory a “flaccid premonition” for cyborg politics. The cyborg, she says “is not subject to Foucault’s biopolitics; the cyborg simulates politics, a much more potent field of operations.” I struggled to understand what this “simulation” could entail, and how it was in fact different from biopolitics. I’m still not sure. Is it because the individual itself is “disassembled and reassembled,” instead of, as in Founcault’s biopolitics, made to exceed her/his body? Is it the sense that we are devices, not data points? That we have—as individuals, not as part of collectives—become “biotic components”? In the sense that we can be known not just as composing a racially diverse population but as being racially diverse within our individual bodies?

Haraway contrasts “Cyborg citizenship” to “Public/Private” in her list of transitional dichotomies. If “cyborg citizenship” is a “simulation” of “cyborg politics,” then “Public/Private” becomes not a dichotomy but a question of degree—how private? How public? The boundary between publicity and privacy is changed not in terms of erasure (which is tantamount to utter loss of privacy) but in terms of spectrum. I wonder how this could be connected to the idea Olivia brought up in class about “private blackness.” What happens to the notion of race as connected to publicity/privacy when the public and private too become a question of degree? How can we see degree of freedom, degree of blackness, and degree of privacy as interconnected in new ways within this new “potent” field of “cyborg politics”?

I’m also interested in the idea of stress as a “the privileged pathology affecting all components of this universe” considering the fact that stress strikes me as so private (no one wants to seem, let alone be “stressed out”). It would be interesting to discuss stress—internal/individual, interpersonal, systemic—in relation to publicity/privacy and cyborg citizenship. In what way does Haraway’s dissolution of the distinction between publicity vs. privacy as replaced by “cyborg citizenship” relate to the pathology of stress?