Cyborg Manifesto
Pick one sentence from Donna Haraway's Cyborg Manifesto that you find particularly confusing, provocative, or striking. Quote it (include the page number), and tell us exactly why. Identify unfamiliar phrases, words, or concepts if necessary.
Here's one that I find striking:
"It is not just that science and technology are possible means of great human satisfaction, as well as a matrix of complex dominations. Cyborg imagery can suggest a way out of the maze of dualisms in which we have explained our bodies and our tools to ourselves." (181)
I find this passage interesting because she tells us that it's not enough to just simplistically say, "technology can be both liberate and enslave us" or "technology can both enhance and diminish our lives" because even this maintains a binary view of technology as good and/or bad. In other words, she not only refuses to take sides on the embrace-or-fear technology debate, she also refuses to accept the terms of the debate, which assumes from the outset that there are two opposing sides (what she calls a dualism). Even to call a compromise between condemning or celebrating technology still assumes that there are two sides rather than a heteregenous network of possible positions.
posted by Irene Chien @ 11:12 AM
17 comments
17 Comments:
"The cyborg would not recognize the garden of Eden; it is not made of mud and cannot dream of returning to dust."
I found this passage interesting because it implies that humans always dream of returning to their "original" state of purity. But Donna Haraway compares this to mud and dust, two things completely unclean; the mud being contaminated by water. However, while mud is relatively messier than dust, mud can be fun and more appealing. Dust is a nuisance that gets everywhere and needs to be cleaned regularly; it even causes allergies. Whereas kids enjoy playing in the mud, and some people even take mud baths. As mud, I would not prefer to be dust. But that thought is against Haraway’s concept of the Garden of Eden, an ideal place that everyone should dream of returning to. What harm would it be if a cyborg did not share this so-called common dream of an original state of purity? They would still function but on a level where they didn’t always feel inferior and damned. To a cyborg, their state of being wouldn’t automatically be considered lesser.
“We require regeneration, not rebirth, and the possibilities for our reconstitution include the utopian dream of the hope for a monstrous world without gender” (181).
I find this passage interesting because it had so many opposing descriptions of a world that she had been arguing to overthrow the capitalism. The repetition of the use of the prefix “re-” was interesting. She was calling for a change, a new beginning, which is the meaning of the prefix, but not a rebirth, not a complete change. There are many parts that she wants us to improve and build off of, not completely start anew. Yet, she uses the conflicting adjectives of “utopian” and “monstrous” for the world we should be striving towards. How is the world monstrous if it is without gender and oppression? Utopia and a monstrous world are the exact opposite. It just goes to show that she doesn’t completely argue for or against one side, and instead sets descriptions in opposition as she did the entire essay, going back to her anti-binary view on technology. It just seems that even if a genderless cyborg world is constructed, she acknowledges that some aspects of society nowadays will still be prevalent.
Haraway seems condemn the old hierarchal structure while offering the cyborg as the solution in creating a utopia, free of boundaries and dualism, and doing away with the “old hierarchal dominations”. I find her claims somewhat confusing and self contradictory when she states that cyborg are “the illegitimate offspring militarism and patriarchal capitalism, not to mention state socialism” (151). I do not understand her statement about the illegitimacy of the cyborg. Perhaps, she is claiming that the old has already tainted the cyborg, which supposedly signifies this pure and ideal goal. Because the cyborg is a creation of militarism, patriarchal capitalism, state socialism, the cyborg continues to serve as a constant reminder of the past. Its connection to the old hierarchal domination continues to create a sense of control and exertion of values in which the cyborg is supposed to remove. So then, how can she offer it as the solution?
"Sex, sexuality, and reproduction are central actors in high-tech myth systems structuring our imaginations of personal and social possibility." (169)
I found this interesting because I never thought that sex is the structure of our personal and social possibility. This helps realize that it is true such as different occupations seem to be specific to gender. For example it would be difficult to find a male secretary or a female mechanic because of predisposed ideas of what is socially acceptable and what is not. People also interact with other based on their beliefs that members of the opposite gender will react a certain way. A male would speak to a femal in a differnt manner than he would other males or work hard earn money, a measure of success, in the hopes of attracting females. Haraway is able to show that we are limited by sex in what we choose not to do and to do.
“And modern war is a cyborg orgy, coded by C3I, command - control - communications - intelligence, an $84 billion item in the 1984’s US defence budget.” (150)
I chose this quote because it was one of the few parts of the essay I knew anything about. The point she makes is that war is the perfect place for cyborg ideology to take hold. Since she wrote this essay in 1991, the military has actually changed its terminology to C4I, adding “computers” to the acronym. The use of computers in the military has served to both integrate technology and the body and also eliminate distinctions in gender. Technology is now used nearly seamlessly in relaying everything from location to eye movements from individuals to commanders. Even more relevant to Haraway’s essay is the fact that technology intensive jobs are gender blind, thus more and more women take high tech roles in the military, tearing down divisions in the process.
“Cyborg imagery can suggest a way out of the maze of dualisms in which we have explained our bodies and our tools of ourselves.”
I find Haraway’s solution to the end of dualisms too radical. This black and white society really doesn’t leave much room for gray areas, thus everything is in opposition to one another: gender, race, education, etc. However, eradicating all these differences in order to make Haraway’s “utopia” would not make the world a better or worse place. A world of cyborgs means a homogenous society in which no one has a unique identity. What is there to gain if everyone is the same? Cyborg imagery may bring down the system of dualisms in society but if it’s at the cost of everyone’s identity, then I don’t think it’s worth it.
“Movements for animal rights are not irrational denials of human uniqueness; they are a clear-sighted recognition of connection across the discredited breach of nature and culture.” (152)
I find this passage interesting because she comments on the mindset behind the idea of animal rights and the connection between man and nature. With the domestication of house pets over the centuries, the line between human and animals has been, in some instances, blurred to nothing. Pet owners become attached to their pets…dressing them in sweaters and t-shirts like children, showcasing and displaying them in competitions like models…and in the process of doing so, begin to see them as humans. By feeling compassion for the animals, they begin to empathize with those animals who are created to be destroyed for food and clothing. For years, humans have felt superior to the animal race, but humans are slowly closing the gap between the two groups by identifying with the animals.
“Late twentieth-century machines have made thoroughly ambiguous the difference between natural and artificial, mind and body, self-developing and externally designed, and many other distinctions that used to apply to organisms and machines.”
I found this quote interesting because it applies perfectly to DADES, Bladerunner, and Videodrome. As technology becomes more and more advanced, it becomes more difficult to tell the difference between real and artificial. We’ve already invented AI that surpasses our own intelligence. (i.e. IBM computer Deep Blue that defeated the world chess champion). And as seen in Videodrome, technology can completely erase barriers between real and imagined, the body and the mind. Because technology is so sophisticated now, it’s been integrated into our lives without us completely realizing it. Now, it's even beginning to be difficult to distinguish between organisms and machines. We're not merely creating more machines, we're creating machines that resemble real animals, like the baby harp seal that Japan is developing. It's disturbing to think that one day machines might reach a level of sophistication like that of the androids in DADES.
"Single vision produces worse illusions than double vision or many-headed monsters." (154)
I chose this paradoxical quote because it criticizes a very popular trend in academics, politics and society in general: having a "viewpoint"...(that is, being Liberal, Conservative, Republican, Democrat, etc.). It seems that once people lock themselves into "single vision" they grow blinders and lose the perspective of the opposition, focusing only on proving the validity of their own acquired views. Donna Haraway offers up the solution that "the political struggle is to see from both perspectives at once because each reveals both dominations and possibilities unimaginable from the other vantage point" (154). This seems a little unrealistic and idealistic, maybe, but ultimately she points out the critical flaw in democratic politics, and a viable solution.
Sorry, the anonymous post above is mine.
"By the late twentieth century, our time, a mythic time, we are all chimeras, theorized and fabricated hybrids of machine and organism; in short, we are cyborgs."
She says that once we become cyborgs all this dualism of man and woman, mind and body, human and animal and human and machine would go away. She says that we will become cyborgs and there would not be a hierarcy. However i feel she is saying it like it was a bad thing. If we elminate the dualism involved there would be no hierarchy but i detect a hint for some reason that that is a detrimental thing. She says "we" like we have already done that. Not like we will "be" because there is still a dualism that exists and hierachy for things that i listed still existed. Fabricated was the key word in the sentence for me because i detect she means fabricated in a sense of phonieness and theorized like made off or fabricated. I dont understand i thought if we were cyborgs it would be a good thing but i detect that in this sentence it would be phony. Kind of confused about that.
yea for some reason it be me dowm for anonymous. i wrote the passage above.
“In the tradition of Western science and politics – the tradition of racist, male-dominant capitalism; the tradition of progress; the tradition of the appropriation of nature as resource for the production of culture; the tradition of reproduction of the self from the reflections of the other – the relation between organism and machine has been a border war…this chapter is an argument for pleasure in the confusion of boundaries.”
(Page 150, Para 2)
I found this particular passage most striking and provocative simply because if Ms. Haraway was actually pushing her Manifesto as a hypothetical engine for social and political change, and advocated a move toward socialism/feminism, society and progress as a whole would go into the toilet, women not excluded. I translate her entire manifesto from hypothetical cyborgs to a bunch of lazy pot-smoking bisexual hippies fornicating in the forest, rolling in dirt and hugging trees in order to make peace with nature. The problem with her statement is that male-dominated capitalism is used synonymously with progress, therefore she does not advocate progress. Capitalism, free markets, and family oriented societies are what has made and what has continued to make America so great, as well as its co functioning alliance with competition and innovation. Now women are a force to be reckoned with in the workplace, their enrollment in college is greater than men, and they are really seen as equivalents in society – thanks to the opposite direction Ms. Haraway proposed we turn (I really think that the gender boundary is already very blurred today – women are doing pretty much whatever they want that men do). Socialism, which redistributes the scale of living in such a manner that everyone lives on nearly the same plateau, gives no incentives for progress and innovation because success is not rewarded, and without innovation and competition, a society will flounder. Also, if we didn’t appropriate nature as a resource for the production of culture, we would therefore have no culture – technology exists (and we exist) as an appropriation of nature. I also find it odd that Ms. Haraway dislikes religion and promotes biology/Darwinism, because it is exactly that Darwinism/evolution which has through nature assigned women a more maternal nature while men hunt and such (which can be likened to male-dominated capitalism). It’s why men don’t have big boobs with milk. Darwinism also preaches survival of the fittest – If humans wish to survive, they have to use resources and kill animals. That dog eat dog principle that Ms. Haraway advocates (in place of God) seems in sharp contrast to her let’s integrate nature animal-rights thing (that bestiality comment she made was terrible, by the way). If Cyborg Manifesto is Donna Haraway’s idea of progress, I’d like to retrogress, thank you very much (there’s a reason why she’s highly unpopular outside of Berkeley).
“Late twentieth-century machines have made thoroughly ambiguous the difference between natural and artificial, mind and body, self-developing and externally designed, and many other distinctions that used to apply to organisms and machines.”
I found this phrase to be significant and striking because it is true that as society progresses the distinction between what is real and what is not becomes infinitely close. In today’s era we have computer graphics that are so realistic that it is very hard to tell it apart from its real counterpart. In today’s society even tiny muscular features are portrayed and even every little wrinkle. The same can be said about robots. Initially they moved stiffly but now the robots have more fluent motion. I also read a news article the other day about a Japanese guy making an actually android and the facial features looked so real. Here is the link if anyone is interested http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/4714135.stm
In a sense, the cyborg has no origin story in the Western sense--a 'final' irony since the cyborg is also the awful apocalyptic telos of the 'West's' escalating dominatons of abstract in individuation, an ultimate self untied at last from all dependendcy, a man in space.
I think this this phrase is interesting because she's saying that this huge change to this utopia is basically going to happen without anyone realizing it. This is supposed to end all forms of individualism and just create a world in which everyone is the same, but no one's going to know when it happened. I just think find it hard to believe that all this can happen without someone taking over the world and forcing this on us. I think that especially as Americans, we pride ourselves on our individuality and that we wouldn't want to conform. If anything, we would rather create more differences.
“Far from signaling a walling off of people from other living beings, cyborgs signal disturbingly and pleasurably tight coupling. Bestiality has a new status in this cycle of marriage exchange.” (152)
I find the concept that Donna J. Haraway is trying to put forward in this statement a bit confusing. I still don’t understand how people or humans can couple or unite with animals or other living organisms. Haraway says that it is possible through cyborgs. However, the question I am still left with is, how modern people, or more specifically, how do we become cyborgs so that we can couple with other living organisms. I’m still not certain if we become cyborgs by taking other living organisms and their aspects into account and adding some of their characteristics to our daily lifestyle. From the entire “Cyborg Manifesto…” essay, I’m still confused as to what a cyborg is. Do we become cyborgs once we take other living organisms into account? Or is there a new race or generation that will be cyborgs and will have these characteristics that Haraway points out in her essay?
Wow, you identified some really explosive quotes, and did a great job of looking at them very carefully. I agree that the figure of the cyborg is a confusing one because many of Haraway's descriptions of the cyborg seem to contradict each other. Despite the fact that she "would rather be a cyborg than a goddess," sometimes it seems like the words that Haraway uses the describe the cyborg have negative connotations ("illegitimate," "artificial," "monstrous," "fabricated," "apocalyptic," "bestiality"). And sometimes it's unclear whether the cyborg is something literal or a metaphor. However, I think that the cyborg is a concept inherently rife with contradictions, precisely because it rejects the pure, whole, and complete as necessarily too totalizing and too restrictive.
However, the way that you have analyzed the consequences and meanings created by Haraway's provocative contradictions is at the heart of how you analyze any text, ALL of which contain contradictions or tensions even if they are not as foregrounded as in Haraway's manifesto. This is the kind of thinking with which you should approach your essays--resisting the urge to master and tame the text(s) with a single, pre-determined, general explanation, but instead honing in and opening up what exactly is being said line-by-line, shot-by-shot.
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