(A cyborg manifesto, Donna Haraway, 2007, p 44)

“Ambivalence towards the disrupted unities mediated by high-tech culture requires not sorting consciousness into categories of ‘clear-sighted critique grounding a solid political epistemology’ versus ‘manipulated false consciousness, but subtle understanding of emerging pleasures, experiences, and powers with serious potential for changing the rules of the game”

(A cyborg manifesto, Donna Haraway, 2007, p 51)

“This is a dream not of a feminist speaking in tongues, but of a powerful infidel heteroglossia. It is an imagination of a feminist speaking in tongues to strike fear into the circuits of the supersavers of the new right. It means both building and destroying machines, identities, categories, relationships, space stories. Though both are bounded in the spiral dance, I would rather be a a cyborg than a goddess.”

(A cyborg manifesto, Donna Haraway, 2007, p 57)

I read ‘A Cyborg Manifesto’ last semester; This semester, ‘A Cyborg Manifesto’ reads like a history of modernism, a historic deconstruction of a social, political and technological journey through the 20th Century.

I would never have thought that I would have been thrown back to one of my favorite writers, Virginia Wolf, in #ededc. I’m taking it that ‘Night and Day’ is cited in ‘A Cyborg Manifesto’ being an encounter of social consequence at the beginning (?) of the 20th C, an encounter with ‘suffrage’ and ‘aristocratic’ deconstruction between the wars, to the experimental modernist novel ‘Waves’ a soliloquy, a deconstruction of time, mind and relationship. The more I think about ‘Wolf’ the more I begin to understand her genius in respect of her remarkable vision, a chaotic understanding and insight of her (and our) future, reflected by Haraway as “instrumental control disappears and all heterogeneity can be submitted to disassembly, reassembly, investment and exchange”; suffrage (social-feminism?) being a key and central theme of ‘Cyborg’, an “emerging bases for new kinds of unity across race, gender and class” (Haraway, 2007), leading to our current “disassembled and reassembled, postmodern collective and personal self” a “powerful infidel heteroglossia” (Haraway, 2007).

Blade Runner (Ridley Scott, 1982) has become almost nostalgic. The concept of the replicant (or Cyborg) lamenting the loss of existence, this for me begins to sum up the notion of ‘Cyborg’. We are all Cyborg now! Asking the question, what level of sophistication will the blurring of technological boundaries facilitate the coming Cognosphere.

“one should expect control of strategies to concentrate on boundaries conditions and interfaces, on rates of flow across boundaries – and not on the integrity of natural objects. ‘Integrity’ or ‘sincerity’ of the Westren self gives way to decision procedures and expert systems” (Haraway, 2007, p 44)

(Marx has more in common with openness than ‘Cyborg’, beyond late Capitalism. social control of information, Neo-Marxism)