Tag: Donna Haraway

Disabled Cyborgs In Space

Donna Haraway’s ironic, binary busting cyborg has deeply influenced the study of the relationship between the human and the technological since she published A Cyborg Manifesto in 1985.  Providing a template for  her cyborg was the 1961 paper by Nathan S. Kline and Manfred Clynes  (K&C)  Drugs, Space and Cybernetics: Evolution to Cyborgs.

K&C’s purpose was to find a path to a space-exploring society unencumbered by the technologically unmediated bodies of “man” poorly evolved to living in a vacuum.

Haraway repurposed this to theorize the path to a feminist-liberatory society unencumbered by  technologically unmediated  female bodies poorly evolved to living in the patriarchy.  She redefined “cyborg” as a hybrid  made to live not in outer space but in the space of social reality. Continue reading “Disabled Cyborgs In Space” →

The Nomadic Cyborg

I have conceptualized here the cyborg in Haraway-ian fashion, as hybrid of the human and the cybernetic, the machinic, the algorithmic.  I have suggested that these partners to the human have a kind of agency that left unexamined is likely to lead to humans misunderstanding their relationship with the machinic. I have let Prof Haraway speak for herself in cautioning against “the solace of human exceptionalism”.

Somehow this seems still a half measure.  Somehow the human almost always seems the senior partner in the hybridization.  The cell phone, the internet of coffee makers, cars, consumer artifacts of every description, the vast extractive enterprises leveling mountains for a few tons of gold, rare earth metals, copper, the semi-autonomous war machines, manufacturing complexes seem somehow, even with a rampant speculative turn here, augmentation.  That is augmentation to the vivid subjet-ivity of human consciousness which experiences each iteration of the machinc as individual, driving nothing from their networked existence, existing only as cell phone, coffee makers, extraction and manufacturing. Continue reading “The Nomadic Cyborg” →

Cyborgs in Space

The Haraway-ian cyborg, the blending, overlapping, the hybridization of the human and the machine-ic, specifically the information, cybernetic, algorithmic machines that are not extensions of human capabilities but partners/competitors of the human, companion species like the wolf/dog our best friends and worst mythic nightmares, that cyborg, as a matter of course, creates not only the architecture/space of the snail’s shell, the open fire warmed architecture of the cave, the intentionalized architecture/space of the hut, tent, cabin, cathedral, and split level suburban house, that cyborg also creates the Code Space of data based architecture-alized information interacting with the cascading contextualization/de-contextualizations, the cascading structure/ruin makings, of cascading algorithms that create in turn, companion, non-Euclidean spaces of curved surfaces and intersecting parallel lines enabling the fractal formation of discontinuous voids and firewalls that simultaneously house and expose the cyborg. Continue reading “Cyborgs in Space” →