If I was feeling cynical, I could review my Week 8 reflections with one question and one word answer.

Qu. “Is our thinking about cyberculture too structured by the kinds of binaries of Haraway critiques?”

Ans. Yes

Sian was supportive in advising us all that Haraway is not an easy read. I have found not only her vision of cyborgs and posthumanism difficult to comprehend, but indeed the whole subject matter. Throughout my studies, I am trying to retain my main objective for studying Digital Culture – that is to utilise digital technology to widen participation and facilitate lifelong learning. Iacknowledge my acceptance that social interaction online has its own parameters. Through other units for the Masters programme, I have already analysed how individuals, removed from real world, f2f interaction, may experience a sense of liberation, since digital environments offer scope for creating their own realities. I am thinking here of anonymous usernames and avatars, as well as the enhanced power of individuals to interact freely where and with whom they want. To this extent, I have approached Haraway and Hayles with some acceptance of social evolution.

This week I have read Haraway and looked for critical analysis of her work online. My lifestream has references to both articles and videos. I have fathomed that Haraway’s article is an ironical challenge to issues of power, feminism and politics via the metaphor that is the cyborg. Based on the premis mankind and technology are gradually merging, the image of the cyborg in the future presents an image of an entity, potentially devoid of the social structures that gives meaning and order today. Her cyborg metaphor deconstructs the binaries of control and lack of control over body nature and culture, in ways that are relevant to current and future societies interaction with technology. Haraway uses the metaphor of cyborg identity to expose ways that elements deemed essential or natural, like human bodies, are not, but are constructed by society’s ideas about them. This has particular relevance to feminism, since Haraway believes women are often discussed or treated in ways that reduce them to bodies. 

I can now see how her article holds relevance when taken as an ironic challenge to society, how elements can contradict one another. Four contradictory elements are identified via the cyborg metaphor – The first is as a “cybernetic organism.” The second is as “a hybrid of machine and organism.” The third is as “a creature of lived social reality”, and the fourth is as a “creature of fiction. Initially, I think I took her too literally, and was instantly critical of her argument. “How could technology reinvent society without retaining some of its political elemnets?” However, once I had read the whole article, and some critical analysis of The Cyborg Manifesto, I saw her as making a challenge to society, rather than proclaiming the dawn of a new world. “The production of universal, totalizing theory is a major mistake that misses most of reality, probably always, but certainly now. Taking responsibility for the social relations of science and technology means refusing an anti-science metaphysics, a demonology of technology.” Taking responsibility also means “embracing the skilful task of reconstructing the boundaries of daily life, in partial connection with others, in communication with all of our parts.” Cyborg imagery suggests “a way out of the maze of dualisms in which we have explained our bodies and our tools to ourselves.” She emphasizes that hers is not a vision of a universal feminism, but instead a “powerful infidel heteroglossia.” For Haraway, cyborgs will be both pleasant and dangerous, and will require both a building and a destroying of “machines, identities, categories, relationships, space stories.”

In my opinion, paradigms of gender and power evolve through social change. History demonstrates the influence of religion, economics and technology on the elements Haraway writes about. Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations and the 18th century industrial revolution led to huge social and political change. Yet society evolved whilst retaining elements of feudalism and patriarchy. Some of the visions of the future cyborg and posthuman studies have truely shocked me and led me to thoughts way beyond the realms of lifelong learning and education. However, as the boundaries between humans and technology continue to erode, I forsee a continuing social evolution. With regards feminism specifically, the potential will exist for the further erosion of gender inequality. Indeed, will there be a need for gender at all?

I hope to broaden my understanding of posthumanism over the coming week, as I take time for the other course reading and blog interaction with fellow classmates. In the meantime, I conclude with a video highlighting The Cyborg Manifesto.

Tags: cyborg, Haraway, posthuman

As soon as I started reading Haraway, my mind quickly drew analysis with The Stepford Wives. Cyborgs – fact or fiction? What is posthumanism?

Well to some extent, cyborgs do really exist. People with artificial limbs, breast implants, pacemakers and artificial joints are all hybrids of nature and technology. I’ve posted mind-blowing videos recently of the impact of future neurological science in embedding digital technology within the brain to alter the way we think in the future. All this, be it present or future, makes cyborgs real.

Posthumanism on the other hand, I find a more complex phenomenon. I see it as a concept more than a reality. It could relate to a hybrid of human and machine – like a cyborg – but intrinsically, the term must be linked to its origins. Posthumans must previously have been humans. Humans are a living species with highly developed brains, capable of abstract reasoning, language, consciousness, analysis and problem solving. These are processes that have evolved naturally and socially over thousands of years.

The difference between the posthuman and other hypothetical sophisticated non-humans is that a posthuman was once a human, either in its lifetime or in the lifetimes of some or all of its direct ancestors. As such, a prerequisite for a posthuman is a transhuman, the point at which the human being begins surpassing his or her own limitations, but is still recognizable as a human person or similar.  In this sense, the transition between human and posthuman may be viewed as a continuum rather than an all-or-nothing event. Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Posthuman

For Haraway, the human is not a natural phenomenon but instead is created in an ongoing process of technological and anthropological evolution. Given the rapid development of technology, and the increased potential of technology to shape human behaviour, it may be that humans are to shortly evolve at such a rate in the coming years, that it will appear our appearance and behaviour are so radically different, we appear as a species other than human.

This brings me back to the Stepford Wives. These fictional cyborgs were a cynical swipe at Western, patriarchial society. Nevertheless, for me, they ask a fundamental question – what power lies behind the construct of cyborgs? If posthumanism is to be a reality, what force will determine its evolution?

Although Haraway endorses technology and the development of the cyborg, she is equally critical of what technology can bring about. The idea that machines can contribute to liberation is something feminists and women should consider.

Haraway cites three crucial “border crossings” which she argues make the call to “return to nature” an impossibility for feminists. The first is the boundary breakdown between humans and animals, which has occurred as a result of things like pollution, tourism and medical experimentation. Baboon hearts transplants, she points out “evoke national ethical perplexity– for animal rights activists at least as much as for the guardians of human purity. ” The second boundary transgression Haraway describes is between humans and machines. In the past, machines were not self-moving, self-designing, and autonomous. Today, however, machines are making “ambiguous the difference between the natural and the artificial,” writes Haraway. Without ever citing the Internet or virtual reality technologies, she alludes to as much when she writes, “Our machines are disturbingly lively, and we ourselves frighteningly inert.”

Teresa Senft on Haraway http://www.terrisenft.net/students/readings/manifesto.html

Tags: cyborg, Haraway, posthuman