-01: Manifesto.
In her seminal essay, “A Cyborg Manifesto,” Donna Haraway employs the image of the cyborg as a vehicle for socialist-feminists to move beyond destructive binaries and towards a politics of feminism centered around collective affinity. She defines the cyborg as “a cybernetic organism, a hybrid of machine and organism, a creature of social reality as well as a creature of fiction” (291). It is “a creature in a post-gender world” and “has no origin story in the Western sense” (292). She cites three “crucial boundary breakdowns” that make the cyborg exist as a political-fictional agent: the dissolution of human/animal, animal-human (organism)/machine, and the physical/non-physical. By fracturing these boundaries, identity as we have come to understand it is also fractured and multiplied. The cyborg realizes the impossibility of creating dualities and clear categories. Instead, the cyborg represents the enmeshment of many categories and dualisms to produce a unique merging. It is important to note, however, that to be a unique manifestation of several origins and sources does not constitute complete and whole independence. In fact, we are the sum of our parts, and we are interconnected with each other because we share similar origins and commonalities. By these affinities we are drawn back towards one another in a vast, networked social cyborg.
We are cyborgs yet to realize the extent of our connectivity with others. We fail to realize not only have we entered a post-gender and posthuman era, but that we have effectively changed the global ecosystem to a cybernetic state through our transportation ties and roots, our drills and tunnels, our power plants and communication lines. We have produced secondary systems of energy flowing across and under the surface of the earth: electricity and information.
Because our relationships to each other and our environment has effectively evolved, we must also change the way we view and assess many of those pillars that determine our humanity. These include philosophy, sexuality, politics, and composition/rhetoric.
We are cyborgs yet to realize the extent of our connectivity with others. We fail to realize not only have we entered a post-gender and posthuman era, but that we have effectively changed the global ecosystem to a cybernetic state through our transportation ties and roots, our drills and tunnels, our power plants and communication lines. We have produced secondary systems of energy flowing across and under the surface of the earth: electricity and information.
Because our relationships to each other and our environment has effectively evolved, we must also change the way we view and assess many of those pillars that determine our humanity. These include philosophy, sexuality, politics, and composition/rhetoric.