Naive or lofty as it may sound, I felt an instant affinity with the posthuman, particularly their liquidity, multiplicity, indefiniteness. These have always bothered me as my characteristics in my insistent attempts to define and refine my identity within the binary hierarchies of family, work, society, culture, an impossible feat, resulting in a kind of hysteria, further augmented due to my dance with technology, fascinating in opening new channels of expression and communication, yet threatening for my offline life and relationships. With a camera as my eyes, Web 2.0 as my mouth voicing my views and longings, cocooned in bed with my ‘friends’, mobiles, kindles and ipods, I can easily come across as a freaky monster.

However, although some might and do see them as mere gadgets, ‘take-it-or-leave-it’ props, I, following Haraway, Stellarc and Zylinska, see them as a network of forces and relations, as an environment, constant de- and re-assemblage ‘with a certain kind of inner unity, in which all the agents become something new in relation to each other’ (Pickering, 2005), part of a greater, more complex and interconnected cognisphere (Hayles, 2006); ‘all agents’ means my ‘friends’ and me. And my ‘friends’, made of sunshine are everywhere, which borders on a blasphemy as it challenges the God and gods and goddesses – consider here my country of provenance, and its tiring insistence to identify itself with Christian symbolism and the politico-ecclesiastical babble persistently drawing dividing lines between ‘us’ and ‘them’ , the damned monsters. Are they damned? Can they be? Not made of mud and unable to turn to dust they force me to look at the promise of an eternal bliss in a different way. Can I hear a sigh of relief escape my lips?

Technology might be threatening but it is what makes us human. And what we make and what (we think) we are co-evolve as the world itself does not seem to impose divisions (optical illusions), does not separate between the human and non-human, organic and nonorganic, the world sees double and fosters an evolving dialectic (Pickering 2005). Those mutual couplings and penetrations took place already in the pre-historic times and came to fruition through the appearance of stone axes, language, beginnings of culture. Elevating the master human as the sole agent is seeing the world through a tiny key-hole, a very limiting and limited perspective and dangerous in that it can stifle imagination and creativity (as Beck’s example in Pickering 2005 shows).

As Haraway professes in her manifesto the borderland in which we have found ourselves as a result of the posthuman shift offers dynamic relationality, a powerful infidel heteroglossia and pleasure. And there is no way to know this land except through the subjectivity (Hayles, 2006) and this is what I am experiencing right now …

Our focus this block is on posthumanities.  Although I had read Donna Haraway’s ‘A Cyborg Manifesto’ a while back, it definitely demanded more than a skim read.   I found a couple of videos of lectures by Haraway that helped give me a better understanding and saved the videos to my YouTube account.  I liked a few quotes and saved them to Tumblr.  One in particular struck me, “To be feminized means to be made extremely vulnerable.” The reason this struck a chord is because there is a drive over here at present to ‘feminize‘ the Cycle 1 schools.  It is hoped that eventually all teaching posts will be filled by locals, at present they are filled mostly by expats.  Unfortunately, the teaching profession is not seen as desirable by males.  However, this being a patriarchal society, it is they who have the power to give or withdraw consent to female workers.  I think this is a topic that can be further explored in a blog.

I am still a little perplexed with the form my Lifestream has taken and wonder if an ‘onlooker’ can make sense of it.  Should I be matching the content with the weekly topics, giving a brief explanation?  Should I be trying out more applications? I have yet to try out my Vimeo account, it was opened when I was having problems with YouTube.  And if I had to do a Lifestream again, how differently would I do it? Thoughts to ponder.