cyberFeminism

[patrick1]

Actually I think Haraway writes better than Kunzru about her ideas. You can read the original cyborg manifesto below. Like some others whose instinct is to dismiss what she says, I find some of the language wearisome - I've been a long time away from academe and don't understand why they have to speak a different kind of English from the rest of us - but I do think the ideas are fascinating. She's trying at least to build bridges between feminism and science, 'Alien' movies and serious thought, sci-fi and academe. And she's ahead of the game, not late to the party.

http://www.stanford.edu/dept/HPS/Haraway/CyborgManifesto.html

 

[sweetnpetite]

I was going to post that last night, but I fell asleep at my computer.

 

[Guest]

S&P, I was going to stay out of this discussion cos it's the kind of thing I take seriously, i.e., I am used to giving long thoughtful posts on such and having no one respond in kind or just ignore my ideas or opinions. (Am I setting myself up? Don't care.)

However, now that Patrick (someone I greatly respect and admire) has posted I've printed out the ms. provided and will get back to you.

Perdita

 

[sweetnpetite]

understanding this theory is gonna require the use of abstact thought

excerpts:

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 international women's movements have constructed 'women's experience', as well as uncovered or discovered this crucial collective object. This experience is a fiction and fact of the most crucial, political kind. Liberation rests on the construction of the consciousness, the imaginative apprehension, of oppression, and so of possibility. The cyborg is a matter of fiction and lived experience that changes what counts as women's experience in the late twentieth century. This is a struggle over life and death, but the boundary between science fiction and social reality is an optical illusion.

I am making an argument for the cyborg as a fiction mapping our social and bodily reality and as an imaginative resource suggesting some very fruitful couplings.


The cyborg is resolutely committed to partiality, irony, intimacy, and perversity. It is oppositional, utopian, and completely without innocence. No longer structured by the polarity of public and private, the cyborg defines a technological polls based partly on a revolution of social relations in the oikos, the household. Nature and culture are reworked; the one can no longer be the resource for appropriation or incorporation by the other. The rela-tionships for forming wholes from parts, including those of polarity and hierarchical domination, are at issue in the cyborg world. Unlike the hopes of Frankenstein's monster, the cyborg does not expect its father to save it through a restoration of the garden; that is, through the fabrication of a heterosexual mate, through its completion in a finished whole, a city and cosmos. The eyborg does not dream of community on the model of the organic family, this time without the oedipal project. The cyborg would not recognize the Garden of Eden; it is not made of mud and cannot dream of returning to dust. Perhaps that is why I want to see if eyborgs can subvert the apocalypse of returning to nuclear dust in the manic compulsion to name the Enemy. Cyborgs are not reverent; they do not re-member the cosmos. They are wary of holism, but needy for connection- they seem to have a natural feel for united front politics, but without the vanguard party. The main trouble with cyborgs, of course, is that they are the illegitimate offspring of militarism and patriarchal capitalism, not to mention state socialism. But illegitimate offspring are often exceedingly unfaithful to their origins. Their fathers, after all, are inessential.

By the late twentieth century in United States scientific culture, the boundary between human and animal is thoroughly breached. The last beachheads of uniqueness have been polluted if not turned into amusement parks--language tool
use, social behaviour, mental events, nothing really convincingly settles the separation of human and animal. And many people no longer feel the need for such a separation; indeed, many branches of feminist culture affirm the pleasure of connection of human and other living creatures. Movements for animal rights are not irrational denials of human uniqueness; they are a clear-sighted recognition of connection across the discredited breach of nature and culture. Biology and evolutionary theory over the last two centuries have simultaneously produced modern organisms as objects of knowledge and reduced the line between humans and animals to a faint trace re-etched in ideological struggle or professional disputes between life and social science.


Biological-determinist ideology is only one position opened up in scientific culture for arguing the meanings of human animality. There is much room for radical political people to contest the meanings of the breached boundary.2 The cyborg appears in myth precisely where the boundary between human and animal is transgressed. Far from signalling a walling off of people from other living beings, cyborgs signal distrurbingly and pleasurably tight coupling.

Late twentieth-century machines have made thoroughly ambiguous the difference between natural and art)ficial, mind and body, self-developing and externally designed, and many other distinctions that used to apply to organisms and machines. Our machines are disturbingly lively, and we ourselves frighteningly inert.

 

[sweetnpetite]

S&P, I was going to stay out of this discussion cos it's the kind of thing I take seriously, i.e., I am used to giving long thoughtful posts on such and having no one respond in kind or just ignore my ideas or opinions. (Am I setting myself up? Don't care.)

However, now that Patrick (someone I greatly respect and admire) has posted I've printed out the ms. provided and will get back to you.

Perdita

Just put the idiots and the thoughtless on ignore, and help me think this concept through.

There are those of us who wish to expand our conciousness, rather than just dismiss what might be unfamiliar, uncomfortable or difficult to understand. Well, at least I do know there is one!

 

[Joe Wordsworth]

I may be missing her point. What, ultimately, is she trying to say?

 

[sweetnpetite]

I may be missing her point. What, ultimately, is she trying to say?

I'm still studying that. I don't understand all of it, but I find some interesting thoughts within....

something like "fuck the eco-feminism back to nature reclaim the goddess movement- technology is the key to our liberation!" [I'm guessing] ANd that we are not bound by our 'nature' or even are organic origins, but that we can design ourselves into anything we want.

of course if you don't believe that woman need liberating anymore or in the oppression of the patriarchy and all that good stuff, it would all be mute. Its just one school of thought within feminism.

However, it does illistate that not all feminists think alike or are what Rush Limbaugh paints them out to be. (the gals from 'NAG')

how I hate that guy...

 

[Joe Wordsworth]

Originally posted by sweetnpetite
I'm still studying that. I don't understand all of it, but I find some interesting thoughts within....

something like "fuck the eco-feminism back to nature reclaim the goddess movement- technology is the key to our liberation!" [I'm guessing] ANd that we are not bound by our 'nature' or even are organic origins, but that we can design ourselves into anything we want.

of course if you don't believe that woman need liberating anymore or in the oppression of the patriarchy and all that good stuff, it would all be mute. Its just one school of thought within feminism.

However, it does illistate that not all feminists think alike or are what Rush Limbaugh paints them out to be. (the gals from 'NAG')

how I hate that guy...

OOOhhhhhh, o.k.

Makes a ton more sense, now.

 

[dr_mabeuse]

Well, just because it's feminist blathskate doesn't mean it isn't still blatherskate.

I'm wary of this kind of manifesto no matter who's doing the blathering.

---dr.M.

 

[shereads]

S&P, thank you for the post. Food for thought.

Dr. M, I'll bet you can't go far wrong, being wary of manifestos. I'm wary of crowds chanting slogans and waving any kind of banner. If there are others like us, we could start a movement. The Non-Movementarians. Its first order of business will be the non-creation of its mission statement; next, the non-design of its flag. After that, no one notifies the newspapers.

 

[sweetnpetite]

S&P, thank you for the post. Food for thought.

Dr. M, I'll bet you can't go far wrong, being wary of manifestos. I'm wary of crowds chanting slogans and waving any kind of banner. If there are others like us, we could start a movement. The Non-Movementarians. Its first order of business will be the non-creation of its mission statement; next, the non-design of its flag. After that, no one notifies the newspapers.

LOL.

Your on a roll today s.r.

 

[shereads]

LOL.

Your on a roll today s.r.

Spreading too little butter over too much toast?



God, that sounds good right now. I haven't had lunch.

 

[sweetnpetite]

Spreading too little butter over too much toast?



God, that sounds good right now. I haven't had lunch.

You shouldn't drink on an empty stomach.

 

[dr_mabeuse]

I’m not down on this because it has to with Feminism, but because this kind of High Acadamese is so common these days, and it’s often a lot of huffing and puffing meaning nothing really. I think they dig this stuff out by the ton out of some dismal academic mine somewhere. You know: “The reflexive I/thou paradigm that has characterized Western intellectual thought is no longer tenable in the retro-integrated weltenshchaung of post-industrial semiotics…”

Ever since McLuhan, Humanities professors have been having wet-dreams about coming up with their own paradigm shifts that are usually jargon-rich and--even better—filled with arcane semi-mathematical symbols, hoping that will give them the same kind of importance and respectability as the physical sciences. I might be wrong, but this looks just like the kind of stuff they put out in academic journals by the linear board-foot.

I don't know. For all I know, she might really be trying to say something, but she seems to be doing her best to be obscure and unintelligible, so I have my doubts. You know, academics bullshit too. More than you'd think.

 

[shereads]

I say we ban the use of the phrase, "paradigm shift." I work with an art director who uses that to make designs sound purposeful.

Client: "Why blue? Why not puce?"

Art director: "Blue represents a paradigm shift in the residential real estate category."

Translation: He likes blue and he doesn't want to start over.

 

[patrick1]

'Blatherskate', that's a word I can use, where does it come from?

I believe I need 'paradigm shift' too, though, otherwise I can never argue drunkenly with my friends about relativity when I don't really understand what I'm talking about.

I suppose I like the Haraway ideas because they are part of a yearning for there not to be a simplistic male/female, technology/goddess, science/nature set of divides. And I too have that yearning.

p

 

[sweetnpetite]

'Blatherskate', that's a word I can use, where does it come from?

I believe I need 'paradigm shift' too, though, otherwise I can never argue drunkenly with my friends about relativity when I don't really understand what I'm talking about.

I suppose I like the Haraway ideas because they are part of a yearning for there not to be a simplistic male/female, technology/goddess, science/nature set of divides. And I too have that yearning.

p

good insight.

 

[Joe Wordsworth]

I could not function without "paradigm".

 

[Virtual_Burlesque]

I could not function without "paradigm".

I believe some paradigm's are wild, doing nothing but flying around messing up things with their paradigm droppings.

Then there are others that are carrier paradigms.

Those you coax until you can catch them, and learn what message they are carrying.

 

[sweetnpetite]

I don't know. For all I know, she might really be trying to say something, but she seems to be doing her best to be obscure and unintelligible, so I have my doubts. You know, academics bullshit too. More than you'd think.

That's true, but you also have to consider that this is an acedemic work and as such is written for an acedemic audience, not for the general public to easily understand. There are certain expectations from an acedemic paper and even non-bullshiting honest acedemics have to write according to the expectations of the industry (or whatever it's called)

Acedemic journals and papers aren't *supposed* to read like Popular Mechanics or Time.

 

[Guest]

I believe some paradigm's are wild, doing nothing but flying around messing up things with their paradigm droppings.
Then there are others that are carrier paradigms.
Those you coax until you can catch them, and learn what message they are carrying.

Brilliantly funny, Burl.

Acedemic journals and papers aren't *supposed* to read like Popular Mechanics or Time.

Or like the average AH post.

Perdita

 

[Guest]

'Blatherskate', that's a word I can use, where does it come from?

Entry printed from Oxford English Dictionary Online, SECOND EDITION 1989, © Oxford University Press 2004
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
bletherskate, blatherskite dial. and U.S. colloq.

[f. BLETHER v. + SKATE in Sc. used contemptuously. The Scotch song Maggie Lauder, in which this word occurs, was a favourite ditty in the American Camp during the War of Independence (J. Grant Wilson, Poets and Poetry of Scotl. I. 82); from this, bletherskate or, as more commonly used, blatherskite, became a familiar colloquialism in U.S.]

a. A noisy talkative fellow; a talker of blatant nonsense. Hence also a vbl. n. blatherskiting; bletherumskite (Ir. dial.) = BLETHER n.

c1650 F. SEMPILL Maggie Lauder i, Jog on your gait, ye bletherskate [v.r. bladderskate]. 1848-60 BARTLETT Americanisms 35 Blatherskite, a blustering, noisy, talkative fellow. 1864 WEBSTER, Blatherskite (‘Local U.S.’). 1864 Spectator No. 1884. 906 A muddle-headed ‘bletherskite’ called Colorado Jewett. 1880 Echo 28 Dec. 3/5 What is expressed by the slang word ‘blatherskiting,’ consumed three of the five days.

b. Foolish talk; nonsense.

1825 T. C. CROKER Tradit. S. Ireland 170 He was, as usual, getting on with his bletherumskite about the fairies. 1861 N.Y. Tribune 28 Dec., To wit, our proving, not by verbal blatherskyte, but by facts, that the C.S.A. is dependent on us. 1892 J. BARLOW Bog-land 82 Wid your little black book full o' blatheremskyte. 1894 Daily News 29 May 5/1 It is still six hundred pages of sheer blood and blatherumskite. 1907 G. B. SHAW John Bull's Other Is. 111, There's too much blatherumskite in Irish politics. 1956 C. WILSON Outsider ix. 272 For Nietzsche..there is no such thing as abstract knowledge; there is only useful knowledge and unprofitable blatherskite.

 

[Guest]

Sweets, I'm sorry but I just can't take the time to read Haraway. I enjoyed a few pages - she's witty at times and has some interesting thoughts but I'm just not into thinking about cyborgs even if related to feminist thought, so I'm putting Cyborgia away.

Perdita

 

[shereads]

I could not function without "paradigm".

I think you give yourself too little credit, Joe.

Unless you're in middle management of a publicly held company that hasn't met its numbers, in which case you must justify a mediocre quarter with a Powerpoint presentation that communicates your broader vision, there's little you can accomplish with "paradigm" that can't be done just as effectively with "content-rich."

I've seen someone laughed at for using "paradigm shift" twice in one meeting. "Content-rich" still gets people nodding.