This week has been about cyborgs. There have been cyborgs everywhere. Once I was able to cut through the visual imagery of the Terminator and Bladerunner, I found it much easier to think ‘cyborg’. Haraway (2000) and Hayles (1999, 2006) seem both to be saying that the cyborg can be used to think in new ways. It is a way of rethinking who we are at different times and adjusting ourselves the idea of having multiple objectivities.
I especially liked Hayles (1999) text. Whereas Haraway’s Manifesto, while calling into question the notion of the transcendent Self, uses the discourse of transcendence, I felt that Hayles brought things back to earth with her professed aim of embodying virtuality: showing that its development and ubiquity can be traced to mundane social factors and that it is considered in certain ways as a result of historic and human-made endeavours. ‘At the same time, we can acquire resources with which to rethink the assumptions underlying virtuality, and we can recover a sense of the virtual that fully recognizes the importance of the embodied processes constituting the lifeworld of human beings.’ (Hayles, 1999, p 21).
As for my own activities on the blog – I have ‘tweeted’ some of my posts, but it seems to be such a silly thing to do that I am afraid I gave it up. It just isn’t in my nature to call out to people ‘hey, I’ve written something’ – it smacks too much of performance for me. Having said that, I have really enjoyed being sent some comments and getting back in touch with those people. Maybe I just prefer a more serendipidous approach to disseminating what is here, for all that is worth….