Notes on Donna Haraway's 'A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technololgy, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century'

An Ironic Dream of a Common Language for Women in the Integrated Circuit

• creature of social reality and (science) fiction
• Foucault's biopolitics
• organism<<production, re-production, imagination>>machine
• socialist-feminist culture and theory; post-modernist; non-naturalist; utopian imagining...'a world without gender...perhaps a world without genesis...maybe also a world without end. The cyborg incarnation is outside salvation history' (p. 425).
• non-oedipal narrative (a different logic of repression)

Dependant on an original unity:
1. Individual development (psychoanalysis): individuation / gender formation.
2. History (Marxism): labour.

Whereas...
3. 'The cyborg skips the step of original unity, of identification with nature in the Western sense' (p. 426).

• no polarity or hierarchical domination

'...cyborgs...are the illegitimate offspringof militarism and patriarchal capitalism, not to mention state socialism' (p. 426).

'...cyborg appears in myth, precisely where the boundary between human and animal is transgressed' (p.427).

• Haunted / 'Ghost in the machine'

Distinctions:
animal - human
organism - machine
physical - non-physical

• cyborg: a simulation of consciousness
• 'cyborg myth about transgressed boundaries' (p. 428)
• most academics have seen deepened dualisms associated with 'high technology' and scientific culture; domination of technics and an imagined organic body.

Fractured Identities

Catherine MacKinnon's radical feminism...

'In the realm of knowledge, the result of sexual objectification is illusion and abstraction. However, a woman is nt simply alienated from her product, but in a deep sense does not exist as a subject or even potential subject since she owes her existence as a woman to sexual appropriation. To be constituted by another's desire is not the same thing as to be alienated in the violent separation of the labourer from his product' (p. 433).

'It is no accident that the symbolic system of the family of man - and so the essence of woman - breaks up at the same moment that networks of connection...are...multiple, pregnant, and commplex.'Advanced capitalism' is inadequate to convey the structure of this historical moment. In the 'Western' sense, the end of man is at stake' (p. 434).

(Concept of 'the end of man' as in Foucault?...)

The Informatics of Domination

• White Capitalist Patriarchy ==>> Informatics of Domination (p.435)
• 'Late Capitalism'
• dichotomies ideologically questioned (p. 436)

'...systems of Myth and meanings structuring our imaginations. The cyborg is a kind of disassembled and reassembled postmodern collective and personal self' (p. 437).

'The boundary is permeable between tool and myth...Indeed, myth and tool mutability constitute each other.'

'...translation of the world into a problem of coding.'

'...a quantity called information.'

'The organism has been translated into problems of genetic coding and read-out.'

'A stressed system goes awry; its communication processes bread down; it fails to recognise the difference between self and other.'

(...See Aram Bartholl's 2009 'urban intevention' Are you human? http://datenform.de/areyouhumaneng.html...)

'fabrication of our imaginations' (p. 438)

'Micro-electronics is the technical basis of simulacra; that is, copies without originals.'

'...the difference between machine and organism is thoroghly blurred; mind, body and tool are on very intimate terms.'

The 'Homework Economy' Outside 'the Home'

• 'More than our imaginations is militarised...' (p. 441)
• '...technologies that offer ultimate mobility and perfect exchange.'
• '...high-tech repressive apparatuses ranging from entertainment to surveillance and disappearance' (p. 442).

Women in the Integrated Circuit

• (Market) '...ever bigger new markets for ever less clearly needed commodities...' (p 443).