cyborg aesthetic

 [photo of rihanna, one hand over eye / taken from an illuminati conspiracy theory website]

all quotes from chapter 8, "a cyborg manifesto: science, technology, and socialist-feminism in the late twentieth century" from the book simians, cyborgs, and women by donna j. haraway

"this chapter is an argument for pleasure in the confusion of boundaries and for responsibility in their construction. . . the cyborg is resolutely committed to partiality, irony, intimacy, and perversity. it is oppositional, utopian, and completely without innocence."

"the relationships 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. . . [cyborgs] are wary of holism but needy for connection."

"pre-cybernetic machines could be haunted; there was always the spectre of the ghost in the machine. . . but basically machines were not self-moving, self-designing, autonomous. they could not achieve man's dream, only mock it. they were not man, an author to himself, but only a caricature of that masculinist reproductive dream. to think they were otherwise is paranoid. now we are not so sure. late twentieth-century machines have made thoroughly ambiguous the difference between natural and artificial, 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."

"the boundary between phsyical and non-physical is very imprecise for us. . . writing, power, and technology are old partners in western stories of the origin of civilization, but miniaturization has changed our experience of mechanism. miniaturization has turned out to be about power; small is not so much beautiful as pre-eminently dangerous, as in cruise missiles. . . our best machines are made of sunshine; they are all light and clean because they are nothing but signals, electromagnetic waves, a section of a spectrum, and these machines are eminently portable, mobile - a matter of immense human pain in detroit and singapore. people are nowhere near so fluid, being both material and opaque. cyborgs are ether, quintessence."

"a cyborg world might be about lived social and bodily realities in which people are not afraid of their joint kinship with animals and machines, not afraid of permanently partial identities and contradictory standpoints."

"consciousness of exclusion through naming is acute. identities seem contradictory, partial, and strategic. with the hard-won recognition of their social and historical constitution, gender, race, and class cannot provide the basis for belief in 'essential' unity. there is nothing about being 'female' that naturally binds women. there is not even such a state as 'being' female, itself a highly complex category constructed in contested sexual scientific discourses and other social practices. gender, race, or class consciousness is an achievement forced on us by the terrible historical experience of the contradictory social realities of patriarchy, colonialism, and capitalism. . . chela sandoval. . . has theorized a hopeful model of political identity called 'oppositional consciousness', born of the skills for reading webs of power by those refused stable membership in the social categories of race, sex, or class. . . sandoval's argument has to be seen as one potent formulation for feminists out of the world-wide development of anti-colonialist discourse. . . as orientalism is deconstructed politically and semiotically, the identities of the occident destablize, including those of feminists."

"cyborg feminists have to argue that 'we' do not want any more natural matrix of unity and that no construction is whole. innocence, and the corollary insistence on victimhood as the only ground for insight, has done enough damage. . . but in the consciousness of our failures, we risk lapsing into boundless difference and giving up on the confusing task of making partial, real connection."

"one important route for reconstructing socialist-feminist politics is through theory and practice addressed to the social relations of science and technology, including crucially the systems of myth and meanings structuring our imaginations. the cyborg is a kind of disassembled and reassembled, postmodern collective and personal self. this is the self feminists must code."

"to be feminized means to be made extremely vulnerable; able to be disassembled, reassembled, exploited as a reserve labour force; seen less as workers than as servers; subjected to time arrangements on and off the paid job that make a mockery of a limited work day; leading an existence that always borders on being obscene, out of place, and reducible to sex."

"the permanent partiality of feminist points of view has consequences for our expectations of forms of political organization and participation. we do not need a totality in order to work well. the feminist dream of a common language, like all dreams for a perfectly true language, of perfectly faithful naming of experience, is a totalizing and imperialist one. in that sense, dialectics too is a dream language, longing to resolve contradiction. perhaps, ironically, we can learn from our fusions with animals and machines how not to be man, the embodiment of western logos."

"every story that begins with original innocence and privileges the return to wholeness imagines the drama of life to be individuation, separation, the birth of the self, the tragedy of autonomy, the fall into writing, alienation; that is, war, tempered by imaginary respite in the bosom of the other. these plots are ruled by a reproductive politics - rebirth without flaw, perfection, abstraction. in this plot women are imagined either better or worse off, but all agree they have less selfhood, weaker individuation, more fusion to the oral, to mother , less at stake in masculine autonomy. but there is another route to having less at stake in masculine autonomy, a route that does not pass through woman, primitive, zero, the mirror stage and its imaginary. it passes through women and other present-tense, illegitimate cyborgs, not of woman born, who refuse the ideological resources of victimization so as to have a real life. these cyborgs are the people who refuse to disappear on cue."

"why should our bodies end at the skin, or include at best other beings encapsulated by skin?"

"monsters have always defined the limits of community in western imaginations."

"cyborg imagery... means both building and destroying machines, identities, categories, relationships, space stories. . . a cyborg body is not innocent; it was not born in a garden; it does not seek unitary identity and so generate antagonistic dualisms without end (or until the world ends); it takes irony for granted. one is too few, and two is only one possibility. intense pleasure in skill, machine skill, ceases to be a sin, but an aspect of embodiment. the machine is not an it to be animated, worshipped, and dominated. the machine is us, our processes, an aspect of our embodiment. we can be responsible for machines; they do not dominate or threaten us. we are responsible for boundaries."

"cyborg gender is a local possibility taking a global vengeance. race, gender, and capital require a cyborg theory of wholes and parts. there is no drive in cyborgs to produce total theory, but there is an intimate experience of boundaries, their construction and deconstruction."

"i would suggest that cyborgs have more to do with regeneration and are suspicious of the reproductive matrix and of most birthing.  . . we have all been injured, profoundly. we require regeneration, not rebirth, and the possibilities for our reconstitution include the utopian dream of the hope for a monstrous world without gender."