Reading Katin’s narration of how the ability to interface directly with machines through cyborg sockets solves the problem of labor alienation, I experienced a somewhat empowering sense of realization. Sockets, as the object that literally breaks the boundaries between human and machine, need not necessarily facilitate the ultimate taken-over of the human by the machine, but is here understood to enable greater capacity of the human by uniting her and the machine; indeed, liberating humanity by making human and machine one. Then I realized how emerged I have been in what Donna Haraway calls the “anti-science metaphysics.” But the image painted by Nova, a human literally plugged into a machine, is the most straightforward trope of the human situation we are facing right now – we do not have to by physically connected to a machine to be cyborgs; we already are each of us a bunch of parts, by no means “natural.” Haraway insists that “machines can be prosthetic devices, intimate components, friendly selves.” We must be able to conceive machines in this way, if we agree that technology is extensions of human; otherwise we are condemning our own subjectivity.
"For us, in imagination and in other practice, machines can be prosthetic devices, intimate components, friendly selves. We don't need organic holism to give impermeable wholeness" stuck out for me in a big way too.
ReplyDeleteIf we're to assume a subject, then we're talking about an identity (and presumably an agency) positioned by a structure in a significant way. If this is the case, then what else is a subject to do but traverse and utilize the structure, and be witness the process?
Is there any better course for experiencing ways in which being positioned a subject is riddled with absurdity?
If I had to totalize my position on this today...
Simultaneously: there was never a prison to destroy, and there will always already be prisons to traverse.
Sometimes they crush, so destroy the prison. Practically, through concrete political action. Or "internally," by destroying self (by motion) by destroying the prison (by motion). What is it to witness?
Sometimes they sing, so celebrate prisons. Not simply as extension, but also as network.
"Cyborg writing must not be about the Fall, the imagination of a once-upon-a-time wholeness before language, before writing, before Man. Cyborg writing is about the power to survive, not on the basis of original innocence, but on the basis of seizing the tools to mark the world that marked them as other."
~~
The questions raised last class about Repressive State Apparatuses are still with me. Although my gospel above sounds dandy for "internal" explosions, I believe Haraway does also start to address the legitimate question about changing the external structures themselves.
By using external forms/technology/categories as tools (not just expressive instruments and playground, but as weapons) one is able to "refuse the reader's search for innocent wholeness while granting the wish for heroic quests, exuberant eroticism, and serious politics." The underscore there being serious politics.