Powerful Cyborg Infidel Heteroglossia

The ghost in the new image of the Cyborg machine-being, new diverse voices, styles of discourse and viewpoints promise a post feminist Cyborg-ism. That is the message which I take overwhelmingly overwhelmed from Haraway’s A Cyborg Manifesto. Only from new ideologically neutered constructs and concepts can the phallus-centred baggage of the past be swept aside in such male defined and dominated concepts as home, market, paid work place, state, school, clinic-hospital and church. Without this exorcism there can be no culturally, politically, genderless, C3I freed form of meaningful communication and advance.

Stylistically Haraway’s writing appeals to me as little as did Hand’s text which we considered earlier. Intellectually and as a dialectic argumentation it radiates powerful energy. I assume that we can agree to accept, as substantially valid, the catalogue of domination, sublimation and abuse which she enumerates. Therefore I wish to cut to what is for me the chase: her plea for a new coding. I refer now to her ‘informatics of domination’ on page 43.

'Why do we remember the past but not the future?' Hawking

It took a long while until I realized that I felt we were looking at different not improved perspectives and that I had great difficulty from my white male position (which I assume will be my ‘label’ whatever I might feel about that) in seeing an ‘improvement’ except in the sociological where ‘racial chain of being’ is replaced by ‘United Nations humanism’. ‘Neocolonialism’ is certainly no improvement. This leaves for me only the improvement area of ‘comparable worth’ replacing ‘family wage’ which I assumed was part of every feminist and Marxist platform.

In the end this puts me in the somewhat disappointing position of having read at length a densely argued, aggressively-toned and bitter polemic that at the finish didn’t bring me much further forward. Everything I stated in my first paragraph I already knew instinctively if not overtly.