Melissammoore’s Weblog

An Ironic Dream of A Common Language for Women in the Integrated Circuit 

Haraway’s first chapter provides us with her socialist feminist views as related to the cyborg. She explains the vision of a cyborg as, “A cyborg is a cybernetic organism, a hybrid of machine and organism, a creature of social reality as well as a creature of fiction. Social reality is lived social relations, our most important political constructions, a world-changing fiction”(1967). Haraway continues saying, “Liberation rests on the construction of the consciousness, the imaginative apprehension, of oppression, and so of possibility. The cyborg is a matter of fiction and lived experience that changes what counts as women’s experience in the late twentieth century” (1967). We can gather from these excerpts that the liberation of women relies on both the lived and constructed image of women as oppressed. It is not enough that we have actual examples of women’s oppression based in reality, but also throughout mediums such as literature, we re-create or fictionalize these examples to strengthen the need for liberation and action. Further in the chapter, Haraway states, “The cyborg is our ontology; it gives us our politics.” continuing, “In the traditions of ‘Western’ science and politics–the tradition of racist, male-dominated capitalism; the tradition of progress; the tradition of the appropriation of nature as a resource for the productions 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” (1968). Haraway is embracing the cyborg as a form of political means. The cyborg represents the combination of technology and social reality, resulting in the blurring of our identities. As assimilated as human and machine are today, there still exists the debate over which is responsible and better suited to take over means of production, reproduction and imagination. The boundary between these two compelling forces is no longer visible enough to declare one ‘this’ and the other ‘that.’ There is no longer definitive separations, we can no longer see the boundaries, and Haraway is taking satisfaction in this confusion and our role in it’s construction. Haraway does not deem one ‘good’ and another ‘bad,’ but rather wants us to recognize how blurred the boundary is and that our role in the creation of this technology resulted in the construction of the cyborg. Haraway explains that the cyborg deconstructs our framework of thinking in binary oppositions.

The three “boundary breakdowns” that Haraway deems most important to analysis of political-scientific analysis are “the boundary between human and animal”- seeing more strongly the connection and influence nature has on culture. She argues that the cyborg is the signal that animal and human are more strongly connected than previously thought. The second boundary is between organism and machine. She brings up the point that previously machines were only a simulation of man’s ability to think. Previous thought dictated that the life of “man” posessed a power to create which could never be achieved through a simulation. Haraway insits that this boundary has been breached as ”machines have made thoroughly ambiguous the difference between natural and artificial, mind and body, self-developing and externally designed”(1970). This idea is explored in Galatea 2.2 as Imp H is a self-reflective machine which functions to develop itself even without the presence of organism (Powers). Much of the Powers novel focuses on the way in which man processes information by inserting the machine’s process of information in a similar way. The machine takes on the identity of a child, learning by continuously expanding its schema for all things literate. The third crossing of boundaries is from the physical and non physical. As technology is increasingly produced smaller and smaller, providing the fluid movement of information or entertainment in a much more fluid manner than humanly possible. Haraway states that they “are about consciousness–or its simulation” (1971). This idea connects to Baudrillard’s idea of the simulacrum in which there is no reality, simply simulations of simulations representing something for which there is no original. This idea is played out in Galatea 2.2 within the argument Powers makes that the machine will never be able to “understand.” Haraway would argue that humans can never “understand” either, since all we signify has no real ’signified.’

The Informatics of Domination

In the second chapter, Haraway addresses the means of power and the transition from former hierarchal means of domination to the new ’networks’ which Haraway calls the Informatics of Domination.  This represents the movement from “modernist” forms of power to “postmodernist” forms of power, the latter being power which has resulted from new advances in science and technology directly affecting current social relations.The list provides a deconstruction of modernism, by using the ideas on the right(postmodern) to deconstruct the left(modern). The list she provides is similar to the list in the Malpas reading (pg 7 of the introduction) which maps the change from modernism to postmodernism, except Haraway focuses mostly on changes which also change relations of power. Some examples of Haraway: Small group>subsystem, Reproduction>replication, Labor> robotics, Mind>artificial intelligence, White capitalist patriarchy>Informatics of domination. She ends this section by saying “the social relations of science and technology” indicate that we are dealing with a  “historical system depending upon structured relations among people”(1976). Haraway goes on to list three major necessities of technological advancement. 1) Technology provides fresh sources of power: Govt. technology to track people, higher functioning weapons for war, The rich can afford new tech. therefore subverting the poor even lower on the social ladder. These sources of power contiunally increase and are used in new ways as technology advances. Haraway insists that as a result,2) this power calls for new means of analyzing the cyborg. This analysis is most commonly found in the form of literature and art. postmodern literature emerged as a way to explore the way in which our world has changed, the way the cyborg has affected our culture, and the way we (humans) have evolved and developed as a result. McHale’s idea of the ontological returns as, in PM. lit, the world itself is called in to question– a way of analyzing the breakdown of the three barriers talked about in the last section. At this point, I feel comfortable admiting that Haraway thinks of Postmodern and Cyborg writing in the same way. This writing, she says, “is about the power to survive, not on the original innocence, but on the basis of seizing the tools to mark the world the marked them as other”(1983). Similarly to the members of Project Mayhem in Fight Club, the children of the cyborg are “Stripped of identity, the bastard race” which is attempting to teach the world about the power of the margins and the importance of using any means possible to survive. Project Mayhem represents the overlooked, the laborors of society who, when united, have the potential to hold the most power.  3) new forms of political action: internet provides a forum for connecting political ideas all over the world. Politicians are realizing how addicted America’s youth is to myspace/facebook/blogging, and have started creating their own internet identities as a way to connect to a younger, fast-paced, internet generation. Powers’ book spends some time discussing how easy this connection is attained, as well as how many different identities one person can portray from one computer chair… This connects to Haraway where she states “Our machines are disturbingly lively, and we ourselves frighteningly inert” (1970).

Winterson’s novel in which she removes access to the narrator’s gender and sex, is a way of analyzing how important the idea of gender really is within our society. By doing so, the reader is unable to form gender-based stereotypes about the narrator, and by the end of the novel is able to contemplate whether or not knowing the narrator’s gender would have changed the reader’s perspective of the character, as well as why or why not. This supports Haraway’s idea that “Gender might not be global identity after all, even if it has profound historical breadth and depth”(1987).  Misti’s example of how this idea can be easier understood is when compared to a pearl. It’s been told that a pearl is built in layers around a speck of dirt. Imagine peeling back hundreds of layers of pearl to find no evidence of anything in the middle. The layers of pearl have built up over time, each formed on top of the other until what truly lies at the middle is not only non-existant, but never was.

The “Homework Economy” Outside “The Home”