In Cyborgs, Haraway attempts to create what she calls an “ironic political myth” that specifically draws on a central image of a cyborg. This cyborg is defined by Haraway as a creature of social reality and fiction, a hybrid of organism and mechanism, and human and technology. Haraway is trying to break these categorical binaries down, but is she doing it effectively? And does hybridity theory replicate binary thinking? “High-tech culture challenges these dualisms in intriguing ways. It is not clear who makes and who is made in the relation between human and machine.” (Cyborgs, 15) I wonder how this interfaces with cyborgs and their position in the narrative of Nova, where cyborg technology is likewise universal. Where I find questions of a future of cybergenetic science, the most troubling aspects of it, as constructed in narratives, reproduce Haraway’s rigidity and centrality of binarisms, where her ironic political myth combines postmodernism and social feminism. "At the beginning of that amazing century, mankind was many societies living on one world; at its end, it was basically what we are now: an informatively unified society that lived on several worlds." (Nova, 156) Now, I am still even questioning the politics of this “cyborgism”.
The idea of a "unified society" and the romanticism surrounding it give me pause. This idea of unity seems to contradict the goals of the cyborg. The characters in Nova, especially those from the Pleiades, are identified principally by planet, not country. Still, the galaxy is divided politically, socially and economically. I am also wondering if expansion paradoxically makes local identity stronger in the context of all the other identities in existence.
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