DONNA HARAWAY, "A CYBORG MANIFESTO: SCIENCE, TECHNOLOGY, AND SOCIALIST-FEMINISM IN THE LATE TWENTIETH CENTURY,"

in Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (New York; Routledge, 1991), pp.149-181.

Background

Donna J. Haraway Currently a professor

and chair of the History of Consciousness Program at the University of California, Santa Cruz, United States.

Donna Haraway's cyborg theory

Cyborg Theory

Summary of Argument

Definition

Some Main ideas

Cyborg Theory

Cyborg theory was created by Donna Haraway in order to criticize traditional notions.

She uses the metaphor of a cyborg as it allows one to move beyond the limitations of traditional gender, feminism, and politics.

Defnition and Origins

A cyborg is a cybernetic organism, a hybrid of machine and organism

A creature of social reality as well as a creature of fiction.

We are all cyborg

“By the late twentieth century, our time, a mythic time, we are all chimeras, theorized and fabricated hybrids of machine and organism; in short, we are cyborg.”

The territories of production, reproduction, and imagination.

Microelectronics mediates the translations of labour into robotics and word processing, sex into genetic engineering and reproductive technologies, and mind into artificial intelligence and decision procedures

Change to gender and production The cyborg is a

creature in a post-gender world.

A cyborg does not have any real allegiance to its creator who it sees as inessential

All work to all play, a deadly game.

Informatics of domination

Reproduction vs Recrafting

Cyborgs bring the breakdown of natural objects like organisms and families.

Communications technologies and biotechnologies are becoming the crucial tools recrafting our bodies.

C3i

The fundamentals of this technology can be condensed into the metaphor C3i, command-control-communication-intelligence, the military's symbol for its operations theory.

Cyborg often thought to have mostly military origins.

Modern biologies

Translation of the world into a problem in coding can be illustrated by molecular genetics, ecology, sociobiological evolutionary theory, and immunobiology.

I would rather be a cyborg than a goddess.

Haraway is a constant contributor to the cyberculture that exists even today.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HyGyJ0aXlbY