Cyborgs and Cybertypes

Cyborgs and Cybertypes

Lisa Nakamura “Cybertyping and the Work of Race in the Digital Reproduction”

&Donna Haraway “Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology and Social Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century”

TECH IV

4/17/2012

What is a Cyborg?“A cyborg is a cybernetic organism, a hybrid of machine and organism, a creature of social reality

as well as a creature of fiction”

Why a Cyborg?Haraway states “I am making an argument for the

cyborg as a fiction mapping our social and bodily reality and as an imaginative resource suggesting some very fruitful couplings”

A Cyborg… is our our ontology

Gives us our politics

Is a condensed image between of image of both imagination and material reality

A creature of post gender world

No origin story in the Western sense

The Border Wars“So my cyborg myth is about transgressed

boundaries, potent fusions, and dangerous possibilities which progressive people might explore as one part of needed political work.”

“This chapter is an argument for pleasure in the confusion of boundaries and for responsibility in their construction.”

3 Boundary DistinctionsMan Vs. Animal“The last beachheads of uniqueness have been polluted if not turned into amusement parks--language tool use, social behavior, mental events, nothing really convincingly settles the separation of human and animal.”

Man Vs. Machine“Our machines are disturbingly lively, and we ourselves frighteningly inert.”

Physical Vs. Non-Physical (subset of the second)“Modern machinery is an irreverent upstart god, mocking the Father's ubiquity and spirituality.”

Cyborg Feminists “It has difficult to name one’s feminism by a single adjective

—or even to insist in every circumstance upon the noun.”

“The recent history for much of the US left and US feminism has been a response to this kind of crisis by endless splitting and searches for a new essential unity. But there has also been a growing recognition of another response though coalition-affinity, not identity”

“Cyborg feminists have to argue that 'we' do not want any more natural matrix of unity and that no construction is whole.”

Informatics of Domination“The frame for my sketch is set by the

extent and importance of rearrangements in world-wide social

relations tied to science and technology.”

“First, the objects on the right-hand side cannot be coded as 'natural', a realization that subverts naturalistic coding for the left-hand side as well.”

“We cannot go back ideologically or materially.”

“The cyborg is a kind of disassembled and reassembled, postmodern collective and personal self. This is the self feminists must code.”

“WOMEN IN THE INTEGRATED CIRCUIT”

“I want to suggest the impact of the social relations mediated and enforced by the new technologies in order to help formulate needed analysis and practical work. However, there is no 'place' for women in these networks, only geometries of difference and contradiction crucial to women's cyborg identities.” Home Market Paid Work Place State School Clinic-Hospital Church“If we learn how to read these webs of power and social life, we might learn new couplings, new coalitions.”

“The permanent partiality of feminist points of view has consequences for our expectations of forms of political organization and participation. We do not need a totality in order to work well. The feminist dream of a common language, like all dreams for a perfectly true language, of perfectly faithful naming of experience, is a totalizing and imperialist one. In that sense, dialectics too is a dream language, longing to resolve contradiction.”

“Cybertyping and the Work of Race in the Age of Digital

Reproduction”What are Cybertypes

“Distinctive ways that the Internet propagates, disseminates and commodifies images of race and racism.”

“Cybertyping is the process by which computer/ human interfaces, the dynamics and economics of access, and the means by which users are able to express themselves online interacts with the “cultural layer" or ideologies regarding race that they bring with them into cyberspace.”

“Cybertypes are the images of race that arise when the fears, anxieties, and desires of privileged Western users (the majority of Internet users and content producers are still from the Western nations) are scripted into a textual/graphical environment that is in constant flux and revision.”

Cybertypes and Benjamin“A rationale for the existence of racial cybertypes

become clear; in a virtual environment like the Internet where everything is a copy, so to speak, and nothing has an aura since cyber-images exist as pure pixelated information, the desire to search for an original is thwarted from the get go”

“This is the paradox: in order to think rigorously, humanely and imaginatively about virtuality and the post human, it is absolutely necessary to ground critique in the lived realities of the human, in all their particularity and specificity.”

Remastering the Internet“Old media provide the foundation for the “new”

and its means of putting race to “work” in the service of particular ideologies are re-invoked, with a twist, in the new landscape of race in the digital age”

“Groups such as racial and ethnic minorities who are prone to being stereotyped in older media are now being “remastered” to use more digital terminology, ported to Cybertyping”

Wheres the multi(cultularism) in multimedia?Where is race in new media?What is the work that race does in

cyberspace, our most currently privileged example of the technology of digital reproduction

What boundaries does it police

Digital Identity “Cyberspace and the images of identity that it produces can be seen as

an interior, mind’s eve projection of the real” “Cybertypes of the biotechnologically enhanced or perfected woman

and of the Internet’s invisible minorities, who can log onto the net and be taken for “white” participate in an ideology of liberation from marginalized bodies”

“Machines which offer identity prostheses to redress the burdens of physical handicaps such as age, gender, and race produce cybertypes which look remarkably like racial and gender stereotypes

“Chosen identities enabled by technology such as online avatars, cosmetic and transgender surgery and body modifications and other cyber-prostheses are not breaking the mold of unitary identity but rather are shifting identity in the realm of the “virtual”

“Bodies get tricky in cyberspace”