1. A Cyborg Manifesto
= a new political myth (based on socialist-feminism)
=a new epistemology confronting race, gender, class
=a revolutionary standpoint
in response to an emerging system of world order, movement from an organic, industrial society to a polymorphous, information system
Socialist feminism is a combination of Marxist and radical feminist view, which Haraway critiques (activites of women named by socialist fmeinists as forms of labour only if the activity can somehow be sexualizd; Mc Kinnon only accepts the women’s experience as defined by desire of men -- the dominated is defined by domination) - Haraway thinks this is not sufficient because they are totalizing (they cannot embrace the status of partial explanation

2. Donna Haraway: ‘Cyborg Manifesto’
What is a ‘cyborg’?
What questions did this article raise?
What are this reading's great strengths?
What are this reading's greatest vulnerabilities?
Where could the reading have gone further?
Your own questions on the readings.

3. Bodies + Machines
The main tools recrafting our bodies is communications technologies and biotechnologies -- they enforce new social relations

4. Cyborg, as used for example by Donna Haraway (1991) and Adele Clarke (1998), means the intermingling of people, things (including information technologies), representations, and politics in a way that challenges both the romance of essentialism and the hype about what is technologically possible. It acknowledges the interdependence of people and things, and it shows just how blurry the boundaries between them have become.
(Bowker & Star, 1999)

5. Source: Appignanesi & Garvatt, Postmodernism for Beginners (Icon Books, 1995), 129.
1940s + the expansion of the cybernetic consciousness

6. Does ideology of technology which promises to liberate the body from its constraints correspond to reality in which we live, or does it only reproduce the existing patterns of power and authority?

7. Cyborg
As the information systems of the world expand and flow into each other, and more people use them for more different things, it becomes harder to hold to pure or universal ideas about representation or information, about identity
Representations of monsters / hybrids are a reflection of that experience of (ruptured) identity (imagined cyborgs in art and fiction, popular culture)
Real cyborgs (technologies of health, beauty ...)

8. Cyborg Picture of possible unity
Framework is rearrangement of social relations related to science & technology
Current movement from organic, industrial society to a polymorphous, information society

9. Analyses of Cyborg
AAA annual meetings: cyborg anthropology sessions (mid-1990s+)
Cyborg Handbook (Gray 1995)
The Cyborg Manifesto (Haraway 1985, 1991)
historical images of cyborgs emerge at times of intense change that involve thinking of how humanity is impacted by technology (Gonzáles 1999)

10. ‘Cyborg’
Source: [accessed Sept. 25, 2002] courtesy of Sarah Oelker

11. ‘Cyborg’
Source: google search for ‘cyborg’ [accessed Sept. 25, 2002] courtesy of Sarah Oelker

12. Cyborg Representations
Grotesque images that involve imagining the relationships bw people and things that are interpenetrated
Bad science fiction or crucial notion for understanding technoscience, and how the knowledge (of science and technology) is shaping lived experience

13. Source: google search for ‘cyborg’ [accessed Sept
Source: google search for ‘cyborg’ [accessed Sept. 25, 2002] courtesy of Sarah Oelker

14. ‘Cyborg’
Source: google search for ‘cyborg’ [accessed Sept. 25, 2002] courtesy of Sarah Oelker

15. ‘Cyborg’
Source: google search for ‘cyborg’ [accessed Sept. 25, 2002] courtesy of Sarah Oelker

16. Cyborg Representations: Gonzáles
Organic cyborg (monster of multiple species)
Mechanical cyborg (techno-human amalgamation)
Cyborg consciousness (abstract, amalgamated, hybrid)
Cyborg body politics? -- Gendered cyborg? (social control over woman’s/man’s body)
Why are robots not cyborgs?
pre-industrial, industrial, post-industrial cyborg

17. Cyborg Representations
The notion of purity based on membership in a single, pristine racial, sexual, or even religious group does not hold in the ‘borderlands’ (the margins) that is populated by cyborgs
Cyborgs are the iconography of modern experience (not natural, but mediated through technology)
Why do they reflect a process of rethinking human nature? (use examples from your own search)

18. autonomous automaton simulacrum Realism (representation)
Simulacrum = imitation, copy, resemblance, quasi, surrogate, contrived image

19. pre-industrial
industrial
post-industrial

20. Cyborg Representations: Gonzáles
Cyborg images appear when the current model of a human being does not fit a new paradigm -- a hybrid model of existence is required to encompass a new, complex and contradictory lived experience -- the cyborg body becomes the historical record of change in human perception in the realm of fantasy
How is the cyborg body reflecting modern experience in each of the cases that you can think of?
What is the habitat of each of these beings?

21. Microbiology, tuberculosis Organic division of labour Sex Labour Mind
“The dichotomies that reflect a shift from the comfortable old hierarchical domination to the new networks I call the Informatics of Domination” (Haraway, A Cyborg Manifesto (1991), 161
Representation
Eugenics [biology]
Hygiene
Microbiology, tuberculosis
Organic division of labour
Sex
Labour
Mind
Racial chain of being
White Capitalist Patriarchy
Simulation
Population control
Stress management
Immunology, AIDS
Ergonomics /cybernetics of labor
Genetic Engineering
Robotics
Artificial Intelligence
Neo-imperialism, United Nations humanism
Informatics of Domination
For Haraway, the hierarchical domination of the industrial age, is supplanted by the informatics of domination of the post-industrial age. In terms of historical framework, the industrial age spans the end of the World War II to find its expression in Star Wars.
Simulation refers to artificial, contrived activities.

22. Informatics of Domination
biotechnology & medicine have the power for liberation but in fact they do not reverse the existing patterns of power & authority
if they are further strengthening the cultural definitions of gender
through practice that involves male professional power and its inscription on a woman’s body
through research guided by the commercial interests of ‘biotechnology-industrial complex’
technology extends social control over woman’s/man’s body differently

23. Cyborgs in art and life: fictional cyborgs
Human with mechanical attributes: (4 look female; 6 look male)
L’Horlogere (mechanical mistress)
Number 18 (from Dragonball Z)
Robocop
The Bionic Woman
Jax (from Mortal Kombat)
6 Million Dollar Man
Molly and Dixie Flatline (from Neuromancer)
Seven of Nine (from Star Trek)
Machine with human attributes: (1 looks female; 4 look male; 1 can change its appearance)
Data (from Star Trek)
Terminator (Arnold Schwarzenegger in Terminator 1 or Terminator 2)
Vicky (from Small Wonder)
T-1000 (from Terminator 2)
Andrew (from Bicentennial Man)
D.A.R.Y.L
Human with magical attributes (magic as another way of controlling nature): (1 male, 1 female)
Harry Potter
Fibi (from Charmed)

24. Cyborgs in art and life: real-life cyborgs
Example: The technology involved:
Wearable Computers Chips in clothes, cups
Kevin Warwick Implant that records nerve impulses
Steve Mann Electrodes and laser computer display in eye
Artificial limbs Chips and gears to replace lost limb
Stem Cell Research Transplants of nerve cells
Rat Robots Rats w/ implants to control movement, feeling
Cloned livestock Copies of animals, potentially used for food
Plastic pods Lightweight barriers to seal off disease
Florida “Cyborg Family” Microchip implants for tracking
Tom Christerson AbioCor artificial heart
Jens Artificial vision sensors to replace lost vision
Lexus factory in Japan Robots doing most work; need human help
Danielle Duval Microchip for tracking
Stephen Hawking Motorized wheelchair and computer voice
Xybernaut Wearable computer w/ display covering 1 eye
“Cloned” virtual humans Computer-animated people based on real ones

25. Cyborg Representations
List the organic (human) and inorganic (technological) characteristics of cyborgs you encountered.
What was your response to these ‘beings’?
Are they monsters, hybrids?
What are they not?