Haraway's Cyborg

Haraway’s cyborg figure, on my initial reading of “A Cyborg Manifesto,” seems historically situated in Reagan era conversations about the history of feminism, identity politics more generally, and the naming and defining of feminism, or other kinds of ‘isms’ for that matter. In this manifesto, Haraway seems to clearly articulate cyborg imagery as instrumental in a vision that eschews theoretical totalizing, describing it as “a major mistake that misses most of reality” (316). Cyborg imagery, Haraway notes, resists both hostility to science and “a demonology of technology” (316).

I’m drawn to Haraway’s call as a “a way out of the maze of dualisms in which we have explained our bodies and our tools to ourselves” (316). Earlier, Haraway points to an exploration of “Cyborg monsters” as opening and exploring “quite different political possibilities and limits from those proposed by the mundane fiction of Man and Woman” (315).

One way I might approach Haraway’s cyborg figure is to ask, in ENG7006 fashion, What does it help me know what I don’t know? As theory, how does it it puncture boundaries and open up new avenues of inquiry? How do I put here ideas, for instance, in relation to Kittler’s techno-determinism?

Haraway’s cyborg as a post-human figure seems more hopeful than Kittler’s pre-determined human figure. The melding of technology with the human in Haraway offers a more fluid, McLuhanian picture of human and technological symbiosis, it seems to me. As opposed to Kittler, whose vision seems to ontologically privilege technology in a way that says technology’s being structures human being. David touches on these issues in Kittler at the end of his post last week, wondering if Kittler’s suggesting that media are a priori to human thinking. I’m not sure if there are satisfactory answers to these questions one way or another, or if there are ways we can know the nature of technology and humanity. But I can say that reading Harraway makes me feel a little more hopeful than Kittler or (perhaps after an office hours visit that helps me understand) Stiegler.

“There are several consequences to taking seriously the imagery of cyborgs as other than our enemies” (315)