Something that this week’s readings spelled out for me, which I have noticed the class dancing around for a while, is the issue of real-world application. I think this may be the reason some of the class felt lukewarm about the race as technology formulation (or maybe I just don’t understand it well enough).
My mom asked me what I was reading when I was reading Haraway, and I told her that it was “The Cyborg Manifesto,” which is about a new way of looking at humans as part-man part-machine. She told me that is ridiculous because she can see and feel that she is a person, and how on earth would a person be a machine? I asked her if she thinks she would be able to function as she did without various technologies, such as her computer and phone, and she said that doesn’t mean they are her. So I said, for example, cognitive scientists have started to think of the mind as whatever allows one to think, inside or outside the body. And she said her mind is what is in her head, and communication devices are merely receivers of it; how could she be anything but herself?
Anyway, this isn’t about how to make sure my mother doesn’t know what’s going on in my MCM classes so that she will still pay my tuition. I’m bringing this up because I think this is how most people would react if they were presented with the idea of race or difference as a technology. I mean, it’s out there. So I realize this may not be the point of the course, but I think it’s really important to pause for a moment and think of how to phrase this idea in plain English so that people (less open minded people, whose prejudices can perhaps be mollified through these theories) will actually get it … or else what use is it?
So here's my attempted plain English explanation of the cyborg as a way to see difference as a technology:
ReplyDeleteTechnologies have shown us how mutable identity is, and hence made us realize that categories like race and gender are not natural, so people should be free to identify or not identify themselves as they choose. Saying man is part machine is a good way of describing this because it means we can’t separate our “selves” from the technologies that enhance and define us. We can use labels to our advantage just as we can use contact lenses or hair dye or psychiatric drugs (I choose these technologies because they are really hard to identify as “me” or “not me” once someone uses them). Like technologies, identities are not inherently internal to us but rather are internalized. Seeing human difference as a technology can open the opportunity to internalize or externalize labels at our liberty and not think that somebody “just is” a member of a category.
The key seems to me to be finding an example that really shocks the listener out of the complacency that our technologies are separate from us because we can pick them up or put them down at will. The idea of using psychiatric drugs (or perhaps, though a less widespread example, an artificial heart or arterial stent) as the example works because it raises the complicated question: "Who is the real me?" Medicated or unmedicated? It may not go far enough as an example to convince the most reluctant, but the idea of a human invention that actually becomes part of the body, albeit temporarily, opens the door in a concrete way to considering our bodily identity as more than just the purely biological.
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