Harraway on boundary
I have just started to re-read the Haraway article, and only now realised she also discusses boundary breakdowns. She mentions that cyborgs represents a transgression.There are 3 boundaries: boundaries of humans-animals, animal-human and machine, boundary between the physical and non-physical.
Harraway suggests:
We are dealing with polymorphous information systems (the informatics of domination) , with the cyborg a kind of disassembled and assembled,postmodern,collective and personal self. Communications technologies and biotechnoogies are the crucial tools re-crafting our bodies. These tools embody and enforce new social relations for women worldwide.
I thought Chantelle’s IVF blog was a great illustration of this, although it is perhaps a bold statement to say that blogs can be seen as conceptual (immaterial) cyborgs… And there will no doubt be other blogs and fora on similar topics appearing rhizomatically . The associated tags of these blogs support a computer-manipulated, machine-enhanced search, stretching enforced boundaries (html, web 2.0) which are always changing. Forum members and bloggers exist through the computer, through internet flows, yet as humans operate individually, the flow of ideas and electricity blended.
The Cyborg as a blog…. a cyblog?
and then there are the members of the ‘internet of things’ – what bleecker calls blogjects – the non-human participating in the flow of ideas. to what extent does their status as non-human matter (and does this status exist, anyway – a question I think that Pedersen would ask)? Boundaries may be forced into fuzziness from both ‘sides’ of the human/non-human…
Shields in ‘Flanerie for Cyborgs’, ‘Cyborgs are both a writerly device and a molecular- or smaller-scale biotechnical idiom.’ seems to fit neatly with not just embodiment of metal and gears, but also ‘grafting’ words…. perfect for blogging.