A Cyborg Manifesto = a new political myth (based on socialist-feminism) =a new epistemology confronting race, gender, class =a revolutionary standpoint in response to an emerging system of world order, movement from an organic, industrial society to a polymorphous, information system
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A Cyborg Manifesto = a new political myth (based on socialist-feminism) =a new epistemology confronting race, gender, class =a revolutionary standpoint.
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A Cyborg Manifesto
= a new political myth (based on socialist-feminism)=a new epistemology confronting race, gender, class=a revolutionary standpoint
in response to an emerging system of world order, movement from an organic, industrial
society to a polymorphous, information system
Donna Haraway: ‘Cyborg Manifesto’
• What is a ‘cyborg’?
• What questions did this article raise?
• What are this reading's great strengths?
• What are this reading's greatest vulnerabilities?
• Where could the reading have gone further?
• Your own questions on the readings.
Bodies + Machines
Cyborg, as used for example by Donna Haraway (1991) and Adele Clarke (1998), means the intermingling of people, things (including information technologies), representations, and politics in a way that challenges both the romance of essentialism and the hype about what is technologically possible. It acknowledges the interdependence of people and things, and it shows just how blurry the boundaries between them have become.
(Bowker & Star, 1999)
Does ideology of technology which promises to liberate the body from
its constraints correspond to reality in which we live, or does it
only reproduce the existing patterns of power and authority?
Cyborg• As the information systems of the world expand and
flow into each other, and more people use them for more different things, it becomes harder to hold to pure or universal ideas about representation or information, about identity
• Representations of monsters / hybrids are a reflection of that experience of (ruptured) identity (imagined cyborgs in art and fiction, popular culture)
• Real cyborgs (technologies of health, beauty ...)
Cyborg• Picture of possible unity
• Framework is rearrangement of social relations related to science & technology
• Current movement from organic, industrial society to a polymorphous, information society
Analyses of Cyborg• AAA annual meetings: cyborg anthropology
• Cyborg body politics? -- Gendered cyborg? (social control over woman’s/man’s body)
• Why are robots not cyborgs?
Cyborg Representations• The notion of purity based on membership in a
single, pristine racial, sexual, or even religious group does not hold in the ‘borderlands’ (the margins) that is populated by cyborgs
• Cyborgs are the iconography of modern experience (not natural, but mediated through technology)
• Why do they reflect a process of rethinking human nature? (use examples from your own search)
autonomous
automaton
simulacrum
pre-industrial
industrial
post-industrial
Cyborg Representations: Gonzáles
• Cyborg images appear when the current model of a human being does not fit a new paradigm -- a hybrid model of existence is required to encompass a new, complex and contradictory lived experience -- the cyborg body becomes the historical record of change in human perception in the realm of fantasy
• How is the cyborg body reflecting modern experience in each of the cases that you can think of?
• What is the habitat of each of these beings?
“The dichotomies that reflect a shift from the comfortable old hierarchicaldomination to the new networks I call the Informatics of Domination”
(Haraway, A Cyborg Manifesto (1991), 161
• Representation• Eugenics [biology]• Hygiene• Microbiology, tuberculosis• Organic division of labour• Sex• Labour• Mind• Racial chain of being
White Capitalist Patriarchy
• Simulation
• Population control
• Stress management
• Immunology, AIDS
• Ergonomics /cybernetics of labor
• Genetic Engineering
• Robotics
• Artificial Intelligence
• Neo-imperialism, United Nations humanism
Informatics of Domination
Informatics of Domination
• biotechnology & medicine have the power for liberation but in fact they do not reverse the existing patterns of power & authority
• if they are further strengthening the cultural definitions of gender
• through practice that involves male professional power and its inscription on a woman’s body
• through research guided by the commercial interests of ‘biotechnology-industrial complex’
Cyborgs in art and life: fictional cyborgs
Human with mechanical attributes: (4 look female; 6 look male)
– L’Horlogere (mechanical mistress)
– Number 18 (from Dragonball Z)
– Robocop
– The Bionic Woman
– Jax (from Mortal Kombat)
– 6 Million Dollar Man
– Molly and Dixie Flatline (from Neuromancer)
– Seven of Nine (from Star Trek) Machine with human attributes: (1 looks female; 4 look male; 1 can change its appearance)
– Data (from Star Trek)
– Terminator (Arnold Schwarzenegger in Terminator 1 or Terminator 2)
– Vicky (from Small Wonder)
– T-1000 (from Terminator 2)
– Andrew (from Bicentennial Man)
– D.A.R.Y.L Human with magical attributes (magic as another way of controlling nature): (1 male, 1 female)
– Harry Potter
– Fibi (from Charmed)
Cyborgs in art and life: real-life cyborgsExample: The technology involved:Wearable Computers Chips in clothes, cups
Kevin Warwick Implant that records nerve impulses
Steve Mann Electrodes and laser computer display in eye
Artificial limbs Chips and gears to replace lost limb
Stem Cell Research Transplants of nerve cells
Rat Robots Rats w/ implants to control movement, feeling
Cloned livestock Copies of animals, potentially used for food
Plastic pods Lightweight barriers to seal off disease
Florida “Cyborg Family” Microchip implants for tracking
Tom Christerson AbioCor artificial heart
Jens Artificial vision sensors to replace lost vision
Lexus factory in Japan Robots doing most work; need human help
Danielle Duval Microchip for tracking
Stephen Hawking Motorized wheelchair and computer voice