This essay has been a very big influence to my project, Donna Haraway teaches ‘A history of consciousness and feminist studies’. I mentioned in my proposal that this will be one of the key texts for the literature review aspect of my methodology.
“A cyborg is a cybernetic organism, a hybrid of machine and organism, a creature of social reality as well as a creature of fiction. Social reality is lived social relations, our most important political construction, a world-changing fiction.”
“The cyborg is a matter of fictional and lived experience that changes what counts as women’s experience in the late twentieth-century.”
“The cyborg is a condensed image of both imagination and material reality, the two joined centers structuring any possibility of historical transformation.”
“The cyborg does not dream of community on the model of the organic family, this time without Oedipal project. The cyborg would not recognize the Garden of Eden; it is not made of mud and does not dream of returning to dust.”
“Our best machines are made of sunshine; they are all light and clean because they are nothing but signals, electromagnetic waves, a section of a spectrum.”
“So my cyborg myth is about transgressed boundaries, potent fusions, and dangerous possibilities which progressive people might explore as one part of needed political work. One of my premises is that most American socialists and feminists see deepened dualisms of mind and body, animal and machine, idealism and materialism in the social practices, symbolic formulations, and physical artefacts associated with high technology and scientific culture.”
“Fractured Identities
Identities seem contradictory, partial, and strategic. With the hard-won recognition of their social and historical constitution, gender, race and class cannot provide the basis for belief in “essential” unity.” – pg 91
“The cyborg is a kind of disassembled and reassembled, postmodern collective of personal self. This is the self feminists must code.”
“Communicatuons sciences and biology are constructions of natural-technical objects of knowledge in which the difference between machine and organism is thoroughly blurred; mind, body, and tool are on very intimate terms.The “multinational” material organization of the production and reproduction of daily life and the symbolic organization of the production and reproduction of culture and imagination seem equally implicated. The boundary-maintaining images of base and superstructure, public and private, or material and ideal never seemed more feeble.”
“Bringing together science, technology and feminism.”
Definition of cyborg: a human and machine hybrid – Haraway defines humans as becoming cyborgs towards the end of the 20th century. She reaches this conclusion by breaking down three main boundaries:
Between human beings and animals – the belief that animals have as much rights as humans.
Between organisms and machines – Haraway describes cyborgs as caricatures. not copies of humans. She poses the question ‘what will cyborgs become?’
Between the physical and non-physical. She describes the non-physical as a sort of energy / sunlight/ entity that we can see but we can’t touch.
Establishing the thought that not everything is binary, a lot of things overlap and intersect in a fluid manner.
Two perspectives of a cyborg world: 1) apocalyptic, masculine war zone which sees cyborgs as an enemy. Military analogies. 2) No longer any boundaries between genders and species, humans working in harmony with animals and machines.
Haraway believes neither of these are true and we have to look at both perspectives.
Described as a ‘monster’ – alien.
Fractured identities – categorised in many different ways. What defines these labels? What constitutes as your body? Thoughts outside of physicality – Salamander metaphor. Regeneration rather than rebirth.