I’m not sure that I was going for critique…just grabbing fragments that were comprehensible to me and trying to compare them to what I thought she might be suggesting!! Perhaps after the first few paragraphs I was lulled into a false sense of security in thinking I could read the rest of the piece as a modernist essay–looking at it as something different, maybe experimental or even self-refuting as far as its textuality and context goes, might have been more helpful. In that case, I kind of get the sense that I sometimes do in reading Derrida…e.g., if words are only meaningful in unique contexts, how could writing this book be meaningful? In this case perhaps it’s a similar quandary…words are the essentialisation of concepts (borrowing from Hayles, Platonic forms stripped of context), but how can you problematise this concept of generalisation, of unification and One, while using words? Not that I don’t think Haraway realises this within the piece; I rather get the sense that she enjoys purposefully enigmatic phrases–’infidel heteroglossia’–while still arguing that ‘Writing is pre-eminently the technology of cyborgs’.

I’m still uneasy about this, though…mostly because I still don’t think I get it But maybe also in the thought that, while Joyce or Woolf also ‘de-essentialise’ words, their work seems to ultimately move towards–perhaps–affinity, while Haraway seems to be moving more towards (again, in an ironic way) a curious individualisation of language (emerging from a personal cyborg experience) which gives up on mutual understanding on the assumption that it never existed anyway…

I think I’d better stop now!