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Donna
Haraway attempts to construct a basis for collective consciousness by mapping
vibrant parallels between the structure of current economic and technological
practices and human actors' fictional capability to comprehend and interact
with a changing ideological structure. Elements of her argument can be
traced to her role as a theorist working in the established traditions
of feminism and socialism. I believe it is her commitment to an ongoing
dialogue with other feminists that provides the impetus for her denunciation
of a future entrenched in the teleology of traditional Western myths. Her
critique of arguments which depend on the image of the female as part of
a splintered and idealized other which awaits ultimate reunification leads
her to name the cyborg as a potent conceptual bastard of white humanism.
The
cyborg is central, both to her own thesis and to those attempting to schematize
her argument. The cyborg, as she defines it, is a germane metaphor for
the implicit assumptions which guide her mission. The cyborg is both a
product of social reality and of fictionalized encryption. The cyborg presents
a being of agency which has the potential to coherently assemble political
confrontations outside of the myths of the original Garden, where woman
is seen as a body with an organic and intuitive grasp of Nature. It does
so as a synthesized creature whose very presence casts traditional dichotomies
into doubt. Three central pairs which the cyborg directly confronts are
the distinctions between human and animal, man and machine, and the physical
and non- physical. At this point, I would like to comment on how Haraway
is attempting simultaneously to describe and inscribe the condition of
contemporary technology. As we have witnessed in Andrew Pickering's book
on the parallels between human and material agency, the scientist¹s
intentions and her capacity to imaginatively construct the future is an
essential point of differentiation between human and machine. He sees symmetry
and mutual affectation, but not a literal consummation. In this sense,
the cyborg of Haraway is an intensely sexual creature which can create
its own conditions for existence. The dichotomy between man and animal
in other established philosophies, such as Buddhism and Hinduism (generic
terms which aren¹t without their share of contentions as to meaning
and potential multiplicity), has been an issue of degree, not kind. This
simply implies that for several centuries humans have had a world view
which didn't necessarily delineate sharp contrasts between man and animal.
I say this to point to an implicit maneuver by Haraway. By her act of interpreting
current and historically recognizable social structures though the construct
of a cyborg, she is attempting to create a directed and engaged consciousness.
She prioritizes the myth of economic theory (her homework economy analysis)
by organizing the possible dissolution of dichotomies as a subsidiary achievement
of contemporary technological forces. The cyborg is the fundamental unit
for an origin myth, which as Haraway insists, is imbued with the atemporality
of a utopia beyond the linear and fractionalized totality of Aristotelian
teleology. The cyborg is not a search for a new fragmentation, or of creating
a new dichotomy, but a biological process that has all the indifference
of evolutionary development within a complicated and dynamic system. As
Ghost in the Shell implies, life itself arises from complexity.
The importance of
myth to Haraway incorporates both her belief in the cyborg as a fictional
element that asserts the capacity to define consciousness and its relationship
with the development of social conditions which expose the weaknesses and
accessibility of previous ideologies. This social phenomenon, the homework
economy, in which the work force is becoming increasingly feminized and
destabilized, is a potential basis for collaboration. Identity has both
literally and creatively become "contradictory, partial, and strategic."
Her understanding of science as a formal embodiment of contingent social
practices is here a useful metaphor for examining the dialectics of an
emergent and liminal space for collective identity. As she emphasizes the
structural role of design (informed by her biology background) over the
strangulating totality of an organic unit, the necessary and causal correlation
between social reality and the formalization of an affiliated community
is not assured. She believes in a certain reality, but is more interested
in the process of shaping and directing that reality, of creating a polyphony
from a cacophony. It is not enough that disparate conditions that destabilize
traditional notions of self and other exist. The creation of a community
of affinity demand that the "logic of repression" be exposed as myth. It
is this sense of directed creativity which I believe justifies her denouncement
of merely "naming" objects and her subsequent elevation of the literal
tradition. The act of naming is an exclusionary practice, whose perceived
value originates from the Western preoccupation with the primitive tribe's
alleged unity with mother/nature. By allowing women to reorient themselves
with literary acts, she is recognizing the productive power of myth in
shaping consciousness. She does not elaborate what the fundamental basis
for the ambiguity of writing is, or how it is necessarily less totalizing
and organic than naming. One may infer that the dissolution between categories
of humans and encoded languages, such as machines, is an apt enough description
of the melding of narrative and reality. Science fiction, then, has the
role of being an appropriate mythic response to current international developments.
To create a sense of community without boxing in an absolute identity requires
the fictional potential of the cyborg. |