Comments on: Cyborgs http://localhost:8888/engl479w/cyborgs/ Thu, 01 Oct 2009 08:00:27 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.6.1 By: mightremindyou http://localhost:8888/engl479w/cyborgs/#comment-69 mightremindyou Thu, 30 Oct 2008 15:20:20 +0000 http://www.mith2.umd.edu/teaching/courses/f08/engl479w/?p=66#comment-69 Donna Haraway’s cyborg myth intends to threaten the dichotomous logic that has allowed oppression, marked by phallocentrism, to proliferate. The cyborg myth displaces the prerogative of the individual through abolishing the conception of definitive identities, or a wholeness of being. Haraway suggests that the self provides a warped sense of privilege, which in fact makes issues like gender, class, and the threat of technological imposition appear as reified structures in society, with specific functions that are intended to maintain the logic of society’s historical and cultural foundations. The manifesto’s critique exposes the hierarchical system’s stake in the regulation of abstractions, such as gender, that determine identity, making them appear impenetrable, and thereby insurmountable. Haraway sheds these outdated myths by taking on a posture of liberation, which can only be characterized by the heterogeneity of the cyborg. Haraway’s cyborg is comprised out of the multiplicity of forces that humans coexist with, forces which demonstrate the interdependence of a world that is emerging in an unparalleled technological age of networks. This networking is the reality of existence; humans are thoroughly enmeshed in a world that disrupts the authoritative separation of bodies through the existence of modes of constant expansion. These modes of expansion can be thought of in a variety of ways, be it the machine, such as an automobile, or perhaps the internet, that allows humans to access the abundance of options and possibilities in reality, which enables reality to function at its global pace, or the animal, whose bodily mechanics reflect our own corporeal existence, a sensation that also obscures the logic of humanity’s superiority. Haraway rejects the determinism of identity, the imperative intention of the cyborg myth, and this is where gender can be truly diffused, as the essay puts it: “To be constituted by another’s desire is not the same thing as to be alienated in the violent separation of the laborer from his product” (Haraway, Norton p. 2280). When the female exists as nothing more than the consummation of male desire, then feminism is relegated to the sexual craving of masculinity, all of which allows male identity to assert its authority, an authority that depends upon unquestionable definitiveness in order to keep its affect on reality pervasive. For Haraway, such a construct of existence must become utterly obsolete; here is the justification for the emergence of the cyborg. Donna Haraway’s cyborg myth intends to threaten the dichotomous logic that has allowed oppression, marked by phallocentrism, to proliferate. The cyborg myth displaces the prerogative of the individual through abolishing the conception of definitive identities, or a wholeness of being. Haraway suggests that the self provides a warped sense of privilege, which in fact makes issues like gender, class, and the threat of technological imposition appear as reified structures in society, with specific functions that are intended to maintain the logic of society’s historical and cultural foundations. The manifesto’s critique exposes the hierarchical system’s stake in the regulation of abstractions, such as gender, that determine identity, making them appear impenetrable, and thereby insurmountable.

Haraway sheds these outdated myths by taking on a posture of liberation, which can only be characterized by the heterogeneity of the cyborg. Haraway’s cyborg is comprised out of the multiplicity of forces that humans coexist with, forces which demonstrate the interdependence of a world that is emerging in an unparalleled technological age of networks. This networking is the reality of existence; humans are thoroughly enmeshed in a world that disrupts the authoritative separation of bodies through the existence of modes of constant expansion. These modes of expansion can be thought of in a variety of ways, be it the machine, such as an automobile, or perhaps the internet, that allows humans to access the abundance of options and possibilities in reality, which enables reality to function at its global pace, or the animal, whose bodily mechanics reflect our own corporeal existence, a sensation that also obscures the logic of humanity’s superiority.

Haraway rejects the determinism of identity, the imperative intention of the cyborg myth, and this is where gender can be truly diffused, as the essay puts it: “To be constituted by another’s desire is not the same thing as to be alienated in the violent separation of the laborer from his product” (Haraway, Norton p. 2280). When the female exists as nothing more than the consummation of male desire, then feminism is relegated to the sexual craving of masculinity, all of which allows male identity to assert its authority, an authority that depends upon unquestionable definitiveness in order to keep its affect on reality pervasive. For Haraway, such a construct of existence must become utterly obsolete; here is the justification for the emergence of the cyborg.

]]>