This week we have are discussing Donna Haraway's Seminole Feminist Postmodernism essay The Manifesto for Cyborgs: Science, Technology and Socialist Feminism in the 1980s, An Ironic Dream of a Common Language for Women in the Integrated Circuit.
In this article, Donna is doing something I always wished to do but wasn't smart enough and that is break out of the Aristotelian mind/body division that has plagued western philosophy since the ancient Greeks. Much of my undergraduate degree in Philosophy was lamenting the gender bias and complete lack of women’s voices. Most of our greatest philosophers, those that are in the canon, are misogynists from Sartre to Nietzsche to the big guy Aristotle. My body has been used against since Aristotle division. I’ve been told that pure logic and knowledge as in truly justifiable cannot be tainted by the body. Therefore, I must eliminate my body from my arguments.
The essay was first published in the Socialist Review and then later published in a book, "Simians, Cyborgs and Women" This book is perfectly titled. Aristotle says that women are just a slight step up from animals and not developed enough to be fully human.
First, who is she? She's the head of the department of the History of Human Consciousness here at UCSC. She is considered a star in the academic world. Ironically after a hugely influential essay for New Media Theorists back in 1985. Her interest is more in ridding the science world of gender bias and exposing the "objectivity" in science research and data recognition and analysis than cyborgs. And yet, this article is a fundamental block in the wall of New Media Theory.
As cyborgs, we can leave the body out of the argument and all of the pitfalls associated with being biological-determinist ideology. This eliminates a heavily burdened and negative historical context of the body from Oedipus to Freud/Lacan. She uses the metaphor of a cyborg in order to construct a postmodern feminism that moves beyond dualisms and moves beyond the limitations of traditional gender, feminism, and politics roles.
This has huge affect for me. Feminist theory has been racked with divisive and fracturing rhetoric that begin with the problems of identity. For years, I’ve been calling myself a humanist because I must embrace all people no matter what sex, color, creed. There are limits to identification that produces the problem of “other”. She explains to us how Marxist feminists are straddled with labor and unifying women through work. This structure of labor is placed upon the woman unnaturally and thus creates fracture. The Feminists needed unity and instead got separation.
I believe her affect has been huge on a lot people. The thing is most interesting to me after seeing her speak and discussing her article is that she is still looking for ways to get out of the mind/body division paradigm. She haves moved from her tongue-in-cheek ironic, came out of the Yugoslavian just post-Tito scene to Australian fundamental land property law. She appropriates the ontology of the Aborogines through the work of ethnographer Debra Bird Rose's book _ Reports from a Wild Country_. More on her at: 
http://cres.anu.edu.au/environhist/network/people/rose.php
Ms. Harraway is looking applying Rose's concept of country and inhabitation in relation to scientific inquiry, research and development and moving into a new paradigm and going beyond the "terra" and into all matter including sunshine. This new way of inhabitation in a country of, for example, the genome browser includes the duty of care with which to face the ancestors and bequeath the progeny or in other words that which. If scientific inquiry were based in this ideology of "country" there would not be an ability to create something that was not thought in terms of what is given, lived and bequeathed. Inquiry would be "opened" to a capacity for ethical engagement that does not exist fully today. It would lead us to a different encounter with the scientific artifacts. Scientist would be living thickly in the place that they care about in a fabulated country.
This "fabulated" country is how I believe the artwork of Patricia Piccinnini http://www.patriciapiccinini.net/ unbeknown to her was working within the same country paradigm of Debra Bird Rose that is until she was informed by Donna.
Donna discussed several of images and sculptures by Piccinnini entitled that question family and surrogacy. http://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/CU0512/S00093.htm
I'm not quite sure what all this means but I love her. I want to read more of her work. She's Lindsay Kelley's advisor. Lindsay Kelley turned Donna onto Patricia's artwork. What a wicked web we weave.
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