Tuesday, April 5, 2011

Paradox of all revolutions

I found Haraway's postmodernist analysis of cyborg culture very fascinating. At the same time, it was very interesting that her claim, in its essence, resembles much of Marxist proletariat revolution although she struggles much depart further from Marxism. She finds cyborgs to be emblem of fluidity and absence of boundary. Concept of cyborg encroaches hierarchy of identity and agency, and distributes all such material privileges and immaterial characteristics to all the people and beings (living beings or machines alike). Perhaps the very ultimate goal of all the postmodernist theories is establishment of Marxist utopia. Through the process of de(con)structing boundaries, we will all live in -- in Haraway's sense "we" would include animals, machines, and so on -- a classless society.

Although there is a far, far way to go for my question to become more than an implausible imagination, I wonder what would come after the age of cyborgs, when we succeed at destructing and deconstructing all the boundaries and binds. All revolutions start from flaws of existing system. Deconstruction of boundaries is possible because there exists boundaries to deconstruct. History progresses, as argued by many historical dialecticist have argued, because there exists a conflict between thesis and antithesis -- every synthesis has become thesis to be attacked. Tomorrow always becomes today and ultimately yesterday, and that is a key paradox of revolution -- revolution renders impeccable dreams to attackable reality. But I wonder if, when all the boundaries have been deconstructed, when we reach the classless, boundaryless utopia, the humankind and all our friends would stop progressing.

1 comment:

  1. I wonder if the development of cyborgs would further separate humans and animals — a dichotomy Haraway actually hopes to dismantle — because animals incorporate technology into themselves / themselves into technology to a far lesser extent.

    ReplyDelete