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.

Sexless and Genderless Cyborgs

We've been considering in this class the ways in which race can be considered a technology; one offshoot from a question such as this is whether gender (which is another inborn physical characteristic that brings with it very distinct social effects) can be considered a technology by a similar route. The Cyborg Manifesto does, to some extent, convince me that gender can at least be considered within the same frame which we've been using for race: not so much as a straightforward technology, unto itself, as an essence. It's somewhat convenient to consider the contemporaneity of the evolution of the civil rights movement after WWII with the first inklings of the movement for women's rights – both are movements of reimagining the role that the particular structuring force (race or gender) play in society and concurrently in the psyche of the individual.

Haraway states: “It's not just that 'god' is dead; so is the 'goddess'. Or both are revivified in the worlds charged with microelectronic and biotechnological politics. In relation to objects like biotic components, one must not think in terms of essential properties, but in terms of design, boundary constraints, rates of flows, systems logics, costs of lowering constraints.”

This speaks of a (constructive) destruction of notions of femininity through the milieu of the technological, through the C³I, through genetic engineering and artificial intelligence, a de-mystification of the feminine. Cyborgs are post-gender, Haraway says, which makes them precisely the potent tools for analyzing gender that they are in her estimation – by asserting the irrelevance and superficiality of gender (here, opposed to sex) through their own lack of gender, they able to prove an entirely modern point. “The ubiquity and invisibility of cyborgs is precisely why these sunshine-belt machines are so deadly. They are as hard to see politically as materially. They are about consciousness – or its simulation.”

Fractured Identities

I am very interested in exploring the concept of Fractured Identities within the Cyborg Manifesto. When Haraway states: "There is nothing about being 'female' that naturally binds women. There is not even such a state as 'being' female, itself a highly complex category contested in sexual scientific discourses and other social practices. Gender, race, or class consciousness is an achievement forced on us by the terrible historical experience of the contradictory social realities of patriarchy, colonialism, and capitalism," I immediately thought of Judith Bulter's concept of Gender Performativity. However, to be "female," and to be a"feminist," is by far not "performed," in the same manner or societally perceived in the same way for women of all races. I am very intrigued by Haraway's comments on fractured female identities and how being "female," does not necessarily unify women as a group. Because, as Bulter states, gender can be seen as a series of performances enforced through societal expectations, existing within the realm of performativity, feminism and the act of rebelling against society, has been equated as being the same for all types of women. While the voice of feminism overall is suggested to represent all types of women, the concerns and voices of black feminists and/or women of non-white backgrounds often go unnoticed. How can we further connect the concept of gender performativity as different within specific races within the female gender? and how can this further perpetuate Haraway's notion that being "female," does not naturally unify women as a collective whole?

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?

Ashton Clark and Donna Haraway: A Cyborg’s Marxism

I find it suggestive that the social theories of Haraway and (the imagined) Clark are both so entwined with Marx’s ideas. Being a bit of a Marxist social theorist myself, I take umbrage at the lately-fashionable statement that “Marxism is dead.” It is a comforting sort of revelation to see visions of forward-looking, technological, cyborg theories that take on the gaps and blindnesses of Marxist theory, and suggest a way in which the discourse is not dead, just awaiting reawakening in a changed form.

Both theorists are trying to address the crippling alienation that industrial society creates in interposing between a human being, his/her labor, and the products of that labor; and both see immense healing and productive power in breaking down the thin boundary that separates human and machine. Clark realizes that the human-machine interface, as it has been developed since the Industrial Revolution, is destructive to the human because it is external: productive actions are mediated through a computer separate from the body, and the human is disempowered—his/her labor is de-skilled, and his/her vitality is sucked away. Clark/Soquet’s futurist, cyborg solution to concrete, real problems highlighted by Marxist theory bears a strong similarity to Haraway’s investigation of possibilities of resistance through cyborg culture. She considers similar problems of alienation, de-skilling, “feminization,” disempowerment.

“It is not clear who makes and who is made in the relation between human and machine,” Haraway writes on page 29 of her essay (right half of pdf page 15), which seems to be both problem and solution in one. Such a lack of clarity alienates only if the individual is ontologically required to be organic. Clark and Haraway claim that embracing this ambiguity of high-tech culture through a (literal or figurative) cyborg existence is vital for undoing the alienation of labor.

Cyborgs, Binaries and Hybridity Theory

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 elephant in the classroom

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?

If you can think of a way to describe the Cyborg Manifesto or any other aspect of the race- as-technology idea in a way that won’t make an average listener respond with the word “ridiculous,” please post it as a comment here.