Donna Haraway 1944- ?
dh There is nothing about being female that naturally binds women. There is not even such a state as 'being' female,itself a highly complex category constructed in contested sexual scientific discourses and other social practices"

-Haraway, "Cyborg Manifesto" (155)




Philosophy of Technology/Feminism

Biography:
Interdisciplinary PhD in Biology and Philosophy
Simians, Cyborgs, and Women : The Reinvention of Nature

Influences:
De Beauvoir: -
construction of what it means to be woman as Other
-oppositions between male/female realms across cultures/discourses
-explores how "Otherness" plays out across discursive fields-
   -male/female =androgyny, metrosexual
    -human/machine
    -human/animal

Foucault-
 the importance of language in constructing reality and webs of power relations
-the use of metaphor to shape our understanding of the logic of a discourse
-looking at individuals on the boundaries as the most creative/transgressive

Primary thesis:

A.social relations are determined by changes in the structure and form of economy/science/culture
   1.our understandings of relationships between sex/race/class   are based on organic, 19th century society
   2.-classical liberal individualism
   3."state of nature" of contract theorists
   4. belief that govt is external, private domain exists
   5. humans are self-governing by use of reason
   
B. Obsolete understandings that no longer fit reality
  1.currently in information systems-based economy, high technology
  2. need new metaphors and theories to explain social/power relationships
  3. old oppositions have broken down and merged
  4. the cyborg is her primary metaphor, post-human world
  5. doesn't make sense to describe humans as only biological units, given impact of technology

C. humans are blended with machines because of technology
  1.we have to re-think what it means to be human
  2. fusion of oppositions into new reality
  3. reflection of advances in science/technology/culture
      a. political understandings need to evolve to reflect new realities
      b. world is defined by "fusion" not "fission" , merging & transformation, not conflict

culture/nature
machine/human r  ai
male/female
science/fiction

So, nature is not a physical place to which one can go, nor a treasure to fence in or bank, nor as essence to be saved or violated. Nature is not hidden and so does not need to be unveiled. Nature is not a text to be read in the codes of mathematics and biomedicine. It is not the "other" who offers origin, replenishment, and service. Neither mother, nurse, nor slave, nature is not matrix, resource, or tool for the reproduction of man. Nature is for me, and I venture for many of us who are planetary fetuses gestating in the amniotic efffluvia of terminal industrialism,4 one of those impossible things characterized by Gayatri Spivak as that which we cannot not desire. Excruciatingly conscious of nature's discursive constitution as "other" in the histories of colonialism, racism, sexism, and class domination of many kinds, we nonetheless find in this problematic, ethno-specific, long-lived, and mobile concept something we cannot do without, but can never "have." We must find another relationship to nature besides reification and possession.


 4.doesn't make sense to think of individual, anymore
 5. nodes of networks & activities are primary unit of analysis
     a.technology, industry, management, politics, etc.
     b. explore the "interfaces"
    c. bionic, symbiotic relations vs parasitical relations  df

I think the answer to this serious political and analytical question lies in two related turns: 1) unblinding ourselves from the sun-worshiping stories about the history of science and technology as paradigms of rationalism; and 2) refiguring the actors in the construction of the ethno-specific categories of nature and culture. The actors are not all "us." If the world exists for us as "nature," this designates a kind of relationship, an achievement among many actors, not all of them human, not all of them organic, not all of them technological.


6. Great possibilities for change exist
    a. nothing static-
    b. everything is open to being reconstituted
           1. old notions of gender (male=strong, female=weak) obsolete, due to technology
           2. affinity groups vs  determined  class structure in political world
           3.  metaphor of virus is central
                a.
new combinations of forms of resistance
                b. interfacing across different fronts & on different basis than before
 c. terrorist networks new threat
         1. mutating into new forms, new weapons
         2. al quaeda swallowing up nationalist insurgencies
map
         3. american campaign to stop the spread- borders become obsolete  ex 

In the liberal logic of representation, the fetus and the jaguar must be protected precisely from those closest to them, from their "surround." The power of life and death must be delegated to the epistemologically most disinterested ventriloquist, and it is crucial to remember that all of this is about the power of life and death.

In this essay I have been arguing for another way of seeing actors and actants- and consequently another way of working to position scientists and science in important struggles in the world. I have stressed actants as collective entities doing things in a structured and structuring field of action; I have framed the issue in terms of articulation rather than representation. Human beings use names to point to themselves and other actors and easily mistake the names for the things. These same humans also think the traces of inscription devices are like names-pointers to things, such that the inscriptions and the things can be enrolled in dramas of substitution and inversion. But the things, in my view, do not pre-exist as ever-elusive, but fully pre-packaged, referents for the names. Other actors are more like tricksters than that. Boundaries take provisional, never finished shape in articulatory practices. The potential for the unexpected from unstripped human and unhuman actants enrolled in articulations-i.e., the potential for generation- remains both to trouble and to empower technoscience. Western philosophers sometimes take account of the inadequacy of names by stressing the "negativity" inherent in all representations. This takes us back to Spivak's remark cited early in this paper about the important things that we cannot not desire, but can never possess-or represent, because representation depends on possession of a passive resource, namely, the silent object, the stripped actant. Perhaps we can, however, "articulate" with humans and unhumans in a social relationship, which for us is always language-mediated (among other semiotic, i.e., "meaningful," mediations).


    c. utopian view- move to a world beyond old dualisms
         1. new creative possibilities & liberty to become whatever can be imagined  rm  
         2. micro-battles, not macro-battles
         3. best of both worlds

 My crude characterization does not end up with an "objective world" or "nature," but it certainly does insist on the world. This world must always be articulated, from people's points of view, through "situated knowledges" (Haraway, 1988; 1991). These knowledges are friendly to science, but do not provide any grounds for history-escaping inversions and amnesia about how articulations get made, about their political semiotics, if you will. I think the world is precisely what gets lost in doctrines of representation and scientific objectivity

    d. dystopian view - re-create systems of power and domination, in ways that represent less equality than in past and are more difficult to combat mc
         1. more subtle forms of control, more difficult to resist  g
         2. utter chaos & dysfunction from efforts to control something that can't be controlled  jp
             a. jurassic park scenario jp
             b. hubris, chaos theory

examples of technology merging with human
-stem cell research
-human genome project
-fertility treatments
-surrogate mothers
flirt-texting


OLD                                                            NEW
Representation Simulation
Bourgeois novel Science fiction
Realism and modernism Postmodernism
Organism Biotic component, code
Work Text
Mimesis Play of signifiers
Depth, integrity Surface, boundary
Heat Noise
Biology as clinical practice Biology as inscription
Physiology Communications engineering
Microbiology, tuberculosis Immunology, AIDS
Magic bullet Immunomodulation
Small group Subsystem
Perfection Optimization
Eugenics Genetic engineering
Decadence Obsolescence
Hygiene Stress Management
Organic division of labour Ergonomics, cybernetics
Functional specialization Modular construction
Biological determinism System constraints
Reproduction Replication
Individual Replicon
Community ecology Ecosystem
Racial chain of being United Nations Humanism
Colonialism Transnational capitalism
Nature/culture Fields of difference
Co-operation Communications enhancement
Freud Lacan
Labour Robotics
Mind Artificial intelligence
Second World War Star Wars
White capitalist patriarchy Informatics of domination

"Cyberspace, absent its high-tech glitz, is the idea of virtual consensual community.... A virtual community is first and foremost a community of belief.''5l For William Gibson (1986), cyberspace is "consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions.... Unthinkable complexity." Cyberspace seems to be the consensual hallucination of too much complexity, too much articulation. It is the virtual reality of paranoia, a well-populated region in the last quarter of the Second Christian Millenium. Paranoia is the belief in the unrelieved density of connection, requiring, if one is to survive, withdrawal and defense unto death. The defended self re-emerges at the heart of relationality. Paradoxically, paranoia is the condition of the impossibility of remaining articulate. In virtual space, the virtue of articulation-i.e., the power to produce connection-threatens to overwhelm and finally to engulf all possibility of effective action to change the world.

-If individuals can be genetically programmed, can they also be manipulated?
-If the body determines the mind, can't we be changed by our bodily state?
-Is reason is also chemically, biologically driven?

What happens to our  assumptions about autonomy? sovereignty? reason? morality?
How do we structure our social/political life in a way that preserves notions of freedom & order w/o authority being imposed by larger structures?
How do we behave politically in a world like this?