This week was a very hectic week after my wife’s operation but somehow I got through lots of the readings. After reflecting on Haraway I posted ‘Cyborg Alice’ which portrayed how I think she portrays her cyborg. I found Shields’ comment to be realistic:
‘Cyborg analysis suggests the body as a lived site and surface, it suggests processes of regeneration rather than rebirth, and the nano-scales of biotechnology as a potential counter-space. This challenges the privilege given to the social, the identity of world historical actors and the traditional locales and practices of politics and justice.’
In ‘Powerful Cyborg Heteroglossia’, I castigated Haraway’s prose style and tone and summarized briefly in my first paragraph what I took from her ‘manifesto’:
‘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. This 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 from meaningful communication and advance.’
In my posting ‘What is the difference between being a cyborg and being posthuman?’, I adopted the following working definitions:
‘A cyborg contains the elements of a human allied with some mechanical, electronic or even bionic elements. It can be humanoid in form as with for example a human with an electronic hand or it can be primarily robotic with human elements implanted like memory. It can be creatively non or superhuman in form but often exhibits some human characteristics which are primarily non-emotional.
Posthuman is a philosophical term referring to humans who are able to act ‘in transition’ and react to change. They operate in change and respond appropriately to changing situations. They are unpredictable and personally motivated by circumstance. They are not bound by -ologies or-isms. They adopt varying personas, hold varying viewpoints, act relative to their inner feelings and not to predetermined notions of the human condition. Just as humans developed from Neanderthal man so posthumans are an ontologically advanced stage of human. I think posthuman is an advancement on existentialism…’
Because of the link back to existentialism which I sensed I quoted Prevert’s poetic existentialist manifesto ‘ Je suis comme je suis’.
Reacting to Hayle’s ‘Toward embodied virtual reality’ I made the point that I felt there were two points of confusion: those between ‘information’ and ‘memory’
and between literary dream and reality state-of-the-art.
illusion or reality?
References:
Haraway, D. (2000). A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late 20th Century. in D Bell and A Kennedy, The Cybercultures Reader. Routledge.
Hayles, N.K. (1999). Toward embodied virtuality, chapter 1 of How we became posthuman: virtual bodies in cybernetics, literature and informatics. Chicago, University of Chicago Press. pp1-25
Sorry about the delay Silvana – I have been ill. Essentially I see the potential for self development in posthumanism through routes which the self selects and which remain true to values which are self-determined rather than imposed by others. I suppose I would say real choice is the key.