Nov
14
Week 8: What are you, a freakin’ cyborg? What does that mean?
November 14, 2011 | 4 Comments
My lifestream this week has been taken up with looking at three areas, the latter two as preparation for deciding on and writing my assignment: the posthuman; politics, digital culture and e-learning; and transliteracy.
I have to admit, on the first subject, I find Haraway’s style detracts from meaning. I am used to the excesses of theory and post-theory writing but Haraway’s often adds more of effect than meaning. By making statements such as ‘the cyborg is resolutely committed to partiality, irony, intimacy, and perversity’ I presume she is rejecting a male-centric academic discourse of rationality, but the effect is to draw the eye away from the more interesting points she makes. For instance she goes beyond the notion of cyborg as machine or part machine, to make very clear its distance from myths that have underpinned gender politics – ‘Cyborg replication is uncoupled from organic reproduction[…]the cyborg has no origin story in the Western sense’ (Haraway 2000, 35). So the cyborg is not born of woman nor does it relate to the story of Adam and Eve and is therefore devoid of the biological and religious connotations that have inexorably led to the construction of male and female genders. This is interesting, but problematic. If the cyborg is ‘not made of mud and cannot dream of returning to dust’, what of the notion of sin? Or of the complexity of gender relations and of the identity of those who believe their biological make-up does not match their real identity? One could argue that the posthuman allows these questions and complexities to be overcome by questioning what Hayles (1999) calls ‘the liberal humanist subject’ (4), the idea that human beings are stable, subjective beings with problematic, constructed concepts such as sin, sexual nature and so on. However my problem with Haraway is that cyberfeminism is ‘an effort to contribute to socialist-feminist culture and theory in a postmodernist, non naturalist mode and in the utopian tradition of imagining a world without gender’ instead of an effort to deal practically, politically with the issues of gender which are very real, if constructed by us. Haraway’s idea of the cyborg is, in her own words ‘as a fiction mapping our social and bodily reality and as an imaginative resource suggesting some very fruitful couplings’. It is also ‘an ironic political myth’. Of course myth and fiction can be used politically to explore possibilities, to inspire change or to challenge perception, but the myth of the cyborg seems to me to bypass the thorny problems of gender rather than deal with them head-on, a notion explored by Ilan Gur Ze’ev. Perhaps I am too hard on Haraway (after all she has somewhat of a cult following) but I increasingly find myself impatient with writing that is so self-consciously performative.
On a more practical level, I used my lifestream to document my search for articles on posthumanism and biomedicine/biotechnology as I think that it is within this area that posthumanism is most relevant through such notions and procedures as IVF, prosthetics, genetic enhancement, extreme human enhancement, continued life and health and even cognition and emotion enhancement – one of the obvious questions hanging over biomedicine is the ethical dimension. This has been a particularly fruitful line of enquiry for me as it has brought together this course with my interest in Medicine and the Humanities. However, one of the questions I have been asking myself is whether using technology, even combining the technological and the human or finding the human in the technological, makes the human any less, or more, than it ever was as if it was to be rejected for something new? Does using a PDA make us posthuman or is it no different from someone 50 years ago using a notebook? I don’t deny that AI along with biomedical enhancement seem to blur the lines of what is human but I think we have to be less wholesale in our assessment of what the posthuman means.
4 Comments so far
Hear hear Carol! I’m stumbled onto Haraways cult following too and thus found myself questioning what it was that annoys me about her writing. I definitely find her to be overly demonstrative and stylized for the sake of it, so it was refreshing to hear your views. A challenging read to be sure but especially so when the language distracts from the content. I think that the fictional super high tech cyborg is a distraction from the more important issue of how technology modifies our thoughts, behaviors, actions and interactions so perhaps she focuses too much on this.
You ask if a PDA is any different to a notebook so will find Andy Clark & David J. Chalmers essay, The Extended Mind to be particularly interesting. http://consc.net/papers/extended.html
Hi Daniel..it’s good to hear you’re of the same mind! I find her ideas interesting but her style and what I feel is a lack of relevance in what she says puts me off. I’m all for abstract theories, but the notion of a cyborg as an antidote to sexism, racism etc just doesn’t work for me – what relevance does it have for women, women of colour or men for that matter. There is something to be said for the posthuman argument about gender boundaries blurring, but ignoring gender is not going to resolve any problems. I’d think that the transgender community might have an issue with the cyborg argument about a utopia without gender as there may be very strong feeling about an affinity with a particular gender. I think there is a sliding scale of gender but that that’s something that has to be dealt with and discussed rather than bypassed. Like you I AM interested in the implications of how technology affects us and can modify us. I remember, when I was writing my PhD, being distracted for 3 hours by playing Doom, and feeling like a character in the game, machine-like, the following morning walking to Uni! Will take a look at the essay thanks!
What a thoughtful and engaging post, Carol – I really enjoyed this. Rather than “bypassing” (interesting cyborg metaphor!) the thornier aspects of gender, I see Haraway as seeking alternate ways of mapping the landscape. I thought you might enjoy one of the blog posts from the last EDC – Dennis’s “love letter” to Haraway and his thoughts about the viral and the post-”ism”. http://edc.education.ed.ac.uk/dennisd/2010/11/09/i%E2%80%99m-a-cyborg-for-you-donna/
Perhaps this is exactly the point you’re making – that we are not ready to be done with feminism and the problems it addresses. But I’m so glad for writers who will turn things on their heads, as Haraway did in her time, and ask whether our priorities are as they should be. I also happen to love her use of language and insistence on its non-transparency, but that’s probably another discussion altogether.