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Class Blog
- Dr Simone Paterson
- Teaches New Media Art and Theory, Cyber Arts and Digital Video and Special Effects in the School of Visual Arts at Virginia Polytechnic and State University (Virginia Tech). She has been invited to teach Contemporary Arts Practices at Hollins University in the MFA program in Dance. Fall 2009.
I feel like Haraway gives me a much stronger sense of her “cyborg” than her “goddess” in this article. However, it seems to me that cyborg culture, existing in “a post-gender world,” offers a freedom from the historic gender roles (attached to womanhood/motherhood) that Haraway’s “goddess” might reflect. However, part of me sees the attractiveness of being a cyborg as opposed to a goddess as having to do with the relative newness of the term, and therefore the open-endedness it seems to offer, as it disrupts the notion of “natural,” offering a new space for the construction of identity. This makes me wonder, though, about the future implications of the cyborg identity, as the longer things exist, the more they seem to solidify, form boundaries, and carry weight…(weight that often becomes baggage).
ReplyDeleteOn a separate note, this statement has made me think about my research paper (on hyper-physicality and the female dancing body). I’ve been spending a lot of time looking at work by Australian Dance Theater (the company whose DVD I shared a little bit of in class) and thinking about the role of the mediated body in cultivating the “hyper-physical” terrain present in much of their work, and then the implications of that hyper-physicality. For example, I observe in the ADT female dancers a level of sexualization that seems to put them on a pedestal in such a way that I would venture to say that the “goddess” is creeping in to the “cyborg.”
When I think of Cyborg, I think of Seria Mau, who refused her destiny as an abused girl child and redefined herself, to become the K-ship whose captain she was. I think of Stephen Hawkins, and what he would have been, had he been born a century earlier. I think of heart valve replacement surgery and the artificial transplants in the heart of my friend. I think of dreams of electric sheep, and imagine possibilities of sensing beyond our bodies. I think of the son who became the God Emperor of Dune by merging his body with that of the sandworm, to save the disappearing desert of Arrakis.
ReplyDeleteWhen I think of Goddess, I think of celebrating and honouring the gifts that the Earth offers us. I think of my New Agey friends and their altars in the woods, and how I am irritated by their way of defining Goddess as fitting to their beliefs and needs. I think of maternal clay figures with many breasts, of a matriarchal utopia. I think of my great aunts and their summer paradise, on the beach with women of all ages, shapes and sizes, naked, strong, sun bathing. I think of belonging, I feel the wish to belong, to have a Home.
Then, I think of Zeus giving birth from his head.
And then, I think of Monique Wittig, replying to a rude interviewer that she does not have a vagina.
So much for a foreword.
Now for Haraway.
I understand the argument, and I find it appealing. The cyborg’s multiplicity, the refusal of origin and of one truth, seems a necessity in order to overcome the dualist thinking that creates and renews boundaries, hierarchies and a self-reinforcing mechanism of othering. The cyborg, with no loyalty to its creators, suggests a possibility of freedom and survival through fluidity, changing, constantly in the process of re-defining self, and/or balancing on the boundaries of rigid definitions. A home in language, communication, networking, instead of a home in a place, a belief system, a genealogy.
But can we afford to refuse the Goddess, the wisdom of ecological feminist thinking? Does it make sense to let go and burn the bridges leading to ‘origin’ in a flashy post modernist kind of way? (Here I am speaking of origin in an ecological sense.) Could not a cyborgic network of identities leave that bridge standing, too, while building a multiplicity of new ones?
Is it possible to combine the two, to have an open fluid cyborg identity, but to still honour the dust or the minerals that we are constructed of? To piss on the Father’s (Mother’s) shoes, but still acknowledge that we are related?
In other words: does metaphysics have to be anti-science? (page 28)
Isn’t that just another dualism that the cyborg image can question and re-define?
I believe we need metaphysics.
We need it to feel the meaning of our actions, not just see the consequences. We need something to believe in: not to flock to one Truth like sheep, but to have a reason to keep living. I believe that if we want to stop raping and abusing the planet we live in, on, and of, we need to acknowledge what we owe to it.
Maybe love is the last stronghold of metaphysics, or maybe it is art.
And maybe art, or love, can open a possibility to imagine a fusion of the two, an ecological cyborg, not of the Family of Man, but bound by love to the minerals she is constructed from.
oops. that's way long. next time i promise not to do this the stream-of-consciousness kind of way...
ReplyDeletehappy thanksgiving everyone <3
First, happy thanks giving.
ReplyDeleteSecond, thanks Ronja gave me some idea of how to read this article, I have to admit that this is a hard reading for my English standard. I feel like I understand and not understand at the same time.
But I tried my best to get it through.
Back to the question.
The "cyborg" Haraway suggested definitely has a new meaning or an extended meaning, which is not or not only Mr. Data in Star Trek that I familiar with.
“The cyborg is our ontology; it gives us our politics.”
She suggested a new political approach, a new self recognition and a new path for the radical feminism by using cyborg.
Meanwhile is not about identity but affinity. For me, that is revolutionary but mild.
However, I could not see much about Haraway spoke about how she define “goddess”, but speaking for general, maybe goddess is represent “reproduction” and “giving birth”. And “goddess” has a sense of a leadership and which is not what Haraway looking for.
So, I believe this is why she said “I would rather be a cyborg than a goddess.”
I feel this is a very extraordinary essay even it was written in the 90s, and gives me a new thought and understanding about feminism.
Hello all and happy day-after Thanksgiving. Sorry for my late response, I was surprised by no internet at my family's place in the Berkshires.
ReplyDelete"Cyborg imagery can suggest a way out of the maze of dualisms in which we have explained our bodies and our tools to ourselves. This is a dream not of a common language, but of a powerful infidel heteroglossia" p. 27
I see the attractiveness of the freedom from "troubling dualisms" (ex: p.24 "self/other, mind/body, culture/nature...") that the concept of the cyborg allows. The expanded vocabulary referred to in the quote from p. 27 above, that takes into account multiplicity and a possibility for expanded language.
I see discussion of cyborg as opportunity for multiplicity within identity as discussed on p. 26 and p. 27: "one is too few, and two is only one possibility..." I see how goddess could be tied to Western ideas of creation, birthing and its implications of dualism, birth as female, a human desire to attain rebirth, a level of perfection....Cyborg as identifying with the notion of "reconstructing boundaries of daily life" and "regeneration, no rebirth"...
On monday, in the midst of trying to wrap my mind around these notions of cyborg and goddess, and find connection in my daily life which I could relate to, I heard a new report on NPR about women choosing to breastfeed their babies and return to work, and the idea of pumping while at the workplace. It also reminded me of a similar New Yorker article I read last year. It may be a stretch, but I can draw some parallels between those stories and what I am extrapolating from this article.
The stories focused on breast feeding moms, and cultural conventions surrounding choices to breast feed, and how long someone might breast feed their baby, due to cultural pressures and their the support of workplaces. Both interviewed a variety of women, who discussed their choice to breast feed despite it not being widely popular among their peers. One major reason those interviewed cited for not breast feeding, or breast feeding for a very short time, was returning to work and needing to pump. I thought of the use of the breast pump as turning both mother, with the use of the pump, and child, with the use of the bottle, into cyborg, and how this invention and its use is perhaps helping to erase the binary of "mother" OR "worker." I am aware that this is in no way a gender-free example, for it still embraces the power of woman-as-mother, but it simultaneously expands a mother's opportunities, choices available, through the use of technology. It allows more choices, less either/or and more room for network and multiplicity.
The report discussed workplaces' power structures and whether they allowed a designated room or not (some had "pumping rooms" and some didn't, requiring women to go to the bathroom (to which some women replied: I wouldn't eat my lunch in the bathroom, would you?!) or stop breastfeeding. People interviewed discussed social pressures from other moms, workplace culture, and lifestyle preference as interwoven factors that affected their decision to breastfeed.
In the above example, I clearly see the way machine/human connection could help broaden possibility and opportunity while erasing gender identification (even while allowing a woman to embrace her role as mother while simultaneously engaging in any profession of her choice). I know it's not a very elegant example, and I am struggling with the particulars, but I think there is something of relevance there. I have never been confronted with this choice, never having been a mom, but I perceive elements of "rather being a cyborg than a goddess" in these women who go against societal pressures which do not embrace the notion of a mom who works and pumps and breastfeeds, those who are willing to go against convention and embrace the possibility, forming new communities, room for multiplicity, along the way.
sorry for the late response. like adrienne, my father doesn't have wireless and there was a line for the only land computer.
ReplyDeletethis is what i think i understood from reading this article: her idea of goddess equals "comfortable old hierarchical dominations" and cyborgs equal "the scary new networks I have called the informatics of domination." If i understood correctly, she wants to be a cyborg because it represents future and an exciting, unknowing of things to come. The goddess is dying with the old way of life. She wants to embrace the new. As Simone says, "give me the chip!" :) With embracing machines, ex. inserting a chip into our arms, our bodies don't have to stop at the skin. she also says perhaps "... we can learn from our fusions with animals and machines how not to be Man, the embodiment of Western logos." I think this is a way for women to be seen as equals to man, "...the hope for a monstrous world without gender."
After spending a few days with my family and rereading this article, I definitely feel a little down. Reading about the domination of man and how women are only there for the pleasure of man and that "...feminized means to be made extremly vulnerable... [women are] seen less as workers than as servers..." etc. Being around my family made me sad because i feel like 98% of them not only believe this but are quite fine with this being true. I know the end of the article might make me feel better but the whole time i felt like a big piece of meat. I think the end of the article did not make me feel 100% better because i don't want the chip in my arm. I think there is another way then becoming part machine. I have this feeling because i see machines as unfeeling and detached (even though they would actually be attached). I'm not so sure that being part machine won't just push us farther away from each other. It might be helpful for some, but people are lazy and hardly put out any effort as it is now to relate and know one another. We need to be human, emotional and caring, and not take the easy way all the time. It will give us a chance to meet new things on the way.
I have no idea if that made any sense, but i feel better. Maybe I'll go into the studio tomorrow and make a piece about feeling like meat....
Go Katie! feminist awakens!
ReplyDeleteyou'll find your own strategy, chip or no chip. and maybe you can show way for your loved ones to start re-imagining their world as time passes. meanwhile, you're not alone!
*hugs*
Hi all! I have enjoyed reading these responses to Haraway's manifesto. This is what I'm thinking:
ReplyDeleteI like the manifesto - what a study!
I was just starting to get the flavor of it, BUT then....
WHY is Haraway choosing between goddess and cyborg?!! Why does she, after asserting a rather convincing call of arms for "a powerful infidel heteroglossia," then conclude with an either/or, hierarchal reduction that she would rather be a cyborg than a goddess? It's another duality... mind/body ... cyborg/goddess... Why choose if you know that "both are bound in the spiral dance" ?
Err, today, I am a cyborg that is part goddess! I am a cyborg goddess in worship of Nietzsche's God is dead but spirit is not. I am part cyborg goddess that will die a death of dust to dust, and will hopefully see an end to self-fulfilling apocalypse prophecy.
I compare/contrast Haraway's manifesto, one of survival, with Buddhist manifestos of dying. Mortality seems absent in her cyborg manifesto even though she talks of survival. Speed and action are its mobilizing force. Buddhist manifestos of death seek luminal transcendence through slowing to absolve incessant reacting.
Cyborg or goddess? Both survival and dying ask us to be more of one thing than the other. AND so does love, compassion, and ideas.
Sometimes my husband is a goddess.
Malinche - slave, interpreter, secretary, mistress, traitor, mother, convert - was both and neither any of these things... both and neither cyborg goddess.
So heteroglossia, yes! Goddess as better than cyborg? - maybe for Donna Harraway at the moment she wrote the last sentence of her manifesto. Its status as a cultural artefact reminds me of this Merleau-Ponty quote:
“The body is not an object… It is always something other than what it is, always sexuality and at the same time freedom, rooted in nature at the very moment it is transformed by cultural influences.”
thank you all for your insightful comments- a joy to read. Wish we had more time together to discuss opinions, change the world and sip tea.
ReplyDeletekindest regards
simone
well if you are ever in bushwick come visit our sweet vegetarian commune... i have some premium chinese tea and there are three cats and a few quite decent human beings too.
ReplyDelete