Posthuman in conversation with Cyborg Manifesto

Central to the texts How we Became Posthuman and The Cyborg Manifesto is a concern for how the posthuman and/or cyborg realities can be used to imagine a better world as opposed to a worse one.  In other words, both texts ask us to interrogate how we can interact with the "informatics of domination" so as to mitigate its potentially disasterous effects.  Both authors have hope that the "protean transformations" (Haraway 310) that can happen in an open playing field for identity construction might extend agency rather than reduce it.  

I appreciate the inherent optimism in trying "to see if cyborgs can subvert the apocalypse..." (Haraway 293),  and why shouldn't I?  Imagination is vital in manifesting intention, and if a tool is just a tool (and I am still claiming that is true), then it should be usable for whatever intention its wielder has for it: domination and control or community and cooperation.

If it is true that “The heart that keeps this circulatory system flowing is narrative—narratives about culture, narrative within culture, narratives about science, narratives within science” (Hayles 22), and, as Haraway suggests,  we need to be weaving other things than shrouds (298), then weaving creative chimera tales that embody resistance is good work to be involved in.  

Haraway and Hayles suggest we should recognize outdated paradigms that no longer embody the energy of resistance that they used to.  Most notably is the end of the oppositional value in the organic versus technological position.  Haraway writes, "...their symbolic systems and the related positions of eco-feminism and feminist paganism, replete with organicisms, can only be understood in Sandoval's terms as oppositional ideologies fitting the late twentieth century. They would simply bewilder anyone not preoccupied with the machines and consciousness of late capitalism" (310).   (I think they bewilder anyone, actually.)  Haraway continues, "There are great riches for feminists in explicitly embracing the possibilities inherent in the breakdown of clean distinctions between organism and machine and similar distinctions structuring the Western self" (311).  In other words, Haraway and Hayles suggest that the images and practices that have governed thought-forms and the ability to act subversively in the 20th century world are no longer adequate for 21st, so rather than find ourselves waving powerless wands, reorienting our relationship to information will help us to see the liberation rather than the fetters in the cyborg role.

Hayles writes, ""If, as Donna Haraway, Sandra Harding, Evelyn Fox Keller, Carolyn Merchant, and other feminist critics of science have argued, there is a relation among the desire for mastery, an objectivist account of science, and the imperialist project of subduing nature, then the posthuman offers resources for the construction of another kind of account" (288).   In other words, the posthuman concept contains the seeds of rebellion just like any other construct; we just have to see the potential and nurture it.

Hayles writes, "To conceptualize the human in these terms [as cybernetic cyborg, as distributed system] is not to imperil human survival but it is precisely to enhance it, for the more we understand the flexible, adaptive structures that coordinate our environments and the metaphors that we ourselves are, the better we can fashion images of ourselves that accurately reflect the complex interplays that ultimately make the entire world one system" (290).   Haraway agrees.  In fact her manifesto is really a call for optimism rather than dystopian depression in the face of the rapidly changing technological environments that are currently constructing world culture.

While I am reluctant to jump on this train, I do understand where Hayles and Haraway are coming from:  They accept that the train has already left the station.  Short of surviving off the grid (which is really no longer possible), I can either work with Hayles and Haraway to use our cultural tools to enact resistance or become an unconscious slave to those tools.  

I can't help but join forces with Hayle and Haraway because I am, after all, a writer.  "Writing is pre-eminently the technology of cyborgs" (Haraway 312).  Knowing how a narrative works enables one to write one (or re-write one).  It's like code.  You have to know the codes.  Hayles writes, "...the narrator becomes not so much a scribe as a cyborg authorized to access the relevant codes" (43).

So why, as a writer, am I so offended by the idea of the cyborg as a cultural reality?  I am a cyborg  (and I have titanium hip to boot.)  I might mourn the loss of my goddess mother and the floral wreathes I never get to wear in my hair and the absence of fawns and hares to tell me nature secrets and bound after me in open meadows, but that doesn't mean that the purposes their instantiations served at one time in history cannot be served by other material manifestations.  I might prefer fur to plastic, but I work with what I have.  

But while Haraway can claim that god and goddess are both dead (312), she cannot claim that the earth is dead (yet).  And here I want to add John Berger (The Way of Seeing) into this conversation because I think he gets at something more directly than Haraway and Hayles do (or at least I find the way he gets at it to be more accessible): In art, there is an original, and while the farther the reproduction gets from the original the more the message changes, it does not erase the fact that there is or was an original.  So when it is claimed that god and goddess are dead, or claimed that the original is dead (or lost), that claim doesn't make it true.  Who can guarantee that someone isn't owning or hiding it?  And this brings me to this question:  What motivates a feminist to claim that the embodiment of the original feminine (the goddess) is dead?  In fiction and in narrative, things only die when you decide to stop honoring the story enough to keep telling it.  That is a choice, not an imperative.

Haraway continues, "It [her chapter] is also an effort to contribute to socialist-feminist culture and theory in a post-modernist, non-naturalist mode and in the utopian tradition of imagining a world without gender, which is perhaps a world without genesis, but maybe a world without end" (292). In my interpretation, she is saying that utopia (in her view) blasts open boundaries--and those blasted-open boundaries will confound the control mongers who concentrate their energies there: "One should expect control strategies applied to women's capacities to concentrate on boundary conditions and interfaces, on rates of flow across boundaries--and not on the integrity of natural objects"..."For example, control strategies applied to women's capacities to give birth to new human beings will be developed in the languages of population control and maximization of goal achievement for individual decision-makers" (302).  This is already the truth.

But I still don't understand how deconstructing identity boundaries such that "There is not even such a state as 'being' female, itself a highly complex category constructed in contested sexual scientific discourse and other social practices" (Haraway 295) makes reproduction safer from control-mongers; I do see that it makes reproduction more accessible. "With information, the constraining factor separating the haves from the have-nots is not so much possession as access (Hayles 39).

As long as birth is no longer something the female body uniquely does (the cyborg can now do it), then the reproductive process is purchasable by whoever wants to afford it; and while this solves the access problem, this access allows agents who heretofore were not permitted access to birth (non-female bodies for example) to try and control the process.  This is the history of modern childbirth. 

I do not fully understand what Hayles and Haraway imagine as the personal self that feminists might re-assemble with code (Haraway 302). If the original is gone (removed from history by too many changes in the reproduced message over time), and we can create a new way of being in the world, what do we want that to look like?  If it does look like a cyborg then are we aware of how our imaginations will work (or not work) in tandem with certain biological constraints (that may not evolve as quickly as our imaginations can)?