yes, cyborgs are complicated

The advantage to completing my reading assignment a bit later than most people in the class is that I get to scan through folks' responses before writing my own. While I agree with the general sentiment about the complexity of the style of this article, and I DO think that is a worthy thing to discuss (for whatever group of people would subscribe to the theory behind Haraway's essay) in terms of distribution and accesability of ideas. I also think that the article had a lot of interesting stuff to say that I could understand. Granted, it took some mental elbow grease to get to the good stuff, but I think I got something out of it in the end, though maybe not everything Haraway might have intended.

I thought one of her most interesting central points was an essential re-defining of the term cyborg to include us all. We are all cyborgs (especially women, and especially especially women of color) because we all are a melange of elements that are undefinable, a mixture of the aspects of a technological society and a more traditional one, a transitional phase between two points. We can not define ourselves distinctly as one thing or another, but must be thought of as a combination and recognized for our in-betweenness.

Haraway continually redefines terms throughout this article, thereby marking "our time," i.e. this postmodern era, as a dynamic and exciting one. (Quite contrary to what Francis Fukuyama would say... I think..) Her table of comparisons (Representation : Simulation, Family/Market/Factory : Women in the Integrated Circuit, Public/Private : Cyborg citizenship, etc.) reconceives terms of the past into their techno-age equivalents. This method of re-naming changes the emphasis of the terms themselves, while pointing to the essential undefinability of these words in an ever evolving society. It's quite fascinating: she says these things as though she knows what they mean, when in reality the terms are so complex and mediated and new and related to so many other terms that it is basically impossible for all readers to understand her points in the same way. It's probably pretty difficult for her to even know what she is telling them because of the multiplicity of meanings for the words she uses.

Then again, I think part of her intent in the stylistic choices of the essay was to question our use of language. She touches on this in her discussion of Malinche, who adopted the language of her oppressor in order to survive. Perhaps this can be seen not only as a linguistic metaphor for women's actions throught history, but a visual one as well. For instance, maybe in order to survive in this capitalist culture visual artists have to adopt the tools of capital to produce in a way that will be menaingful for society (I'm thinking of Andy Warhol, Banksy, and the folks who use advertising imagery to subvert advertising). And then Haraway discusses the role of the liberal and radical in current cyborg discourse... perhaps her feminist usage of the word cyborg itself is an adoption of the language of the oppressor (capitalism? men?) to survive the new 'homework economy' where women are (Haraway says) forced into... I'm not exactly sure what.

There's a significant tension in the essay between women's active role in their situations of oppression and the activity of others who put them into situations of oppression. In other words, I wasn't really sure whether the 'homework economy' was a good thing or a bad thing for women. I guess Haraway was saying it was a difficulty, but not passing judgment. This is an effective argumentative method, considering one of her central theses is that identity is not universal. The homework economy can be good for some women and not for others and this doesn't really say anything about women generally except that each one experiences the world differently.

I also wanted to mention the werid way that misspellings and letter replacement began to take on a more and more prominent role towards the end of the essay. At first, I thought the misspellings were typos, but then I realized that there was a pattern: replacing 'ti' with 'd' and so on and so on. I didn't exactly get why Haraway was doing this, but I thought it might be a sort of transition into an even newer language, and through this transition she's encouraging her readers to pay more attention to the way we use language now (kind of like how she uses the idea that we are all cyborgs to discuss/clarify the place of women in society). The way that many of the misspellings and letter replacements were patterned made me think that she was trying to replicate the work of a computer that is tasked to make those kind of replacements intentionally... was she trying to be more mechanical or automatic? Was she trying to exhibit cyborg traits (simulation of the human propensity to create typos... but not exactly understanding this and so doing it in a very mechanical and un-human way)?