Download Cyborgs and Cybertype

TECH IV
Cyborgs and Cybertypes
Lisa Nakamura “Cybertyping and the Work of Race in the Digital Reproduction”
&
Donna Haraway “Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology and Social Feminism in
the Late Twentieth Century”
4/17/2012
What is a Cyborg?
 “A cyborg is a cybernetic organism, a hybrid of machine
and organism, a creature of social reality as well as a
creature of fiction”
Why a Cyborg?
 Haraway states “I am making an argument for the
cyborg as a fiction mapping our social and bodily reality
and as an imaginative resource suggesting some very
fruitful couplings”
 A Cyborg…

is our our ontology

Gives us our politics

Is a condensed image between of image of both imagination and material reality

A creature of post gender world

No origin story in the Western sense
The Border Wars
 “So my cyborg myth is about transgressed boundaries,
potent fusions, and dangerous possibilities which
progressive people might explore as one part of needed
political work.”
 “This chapter is an argument for pleasure in the
confusion of boundaries and for responsibility in their
construction.”
3 Boundary Distinctions
 Man Vs. Animal
“The last beachheads of uniqueness have been polluted if not turned into
amusement parks--language tool use, social behavior, mental events, nothing
really convincingly settles the separation of human and animal.”
 Man Vs. Machine
“Our machines are disturbingly lively, and we ourselves frighteningly inert.”
 Physical Vs. Non-Physical (subset of the second)
“Modern machinery is an irreverent upstart god, mocking the Father's ubiquity
and spirituality.”
Cyborg Feminists
 “It has difficult to name one’s feminism by a single adjective—or
even to insist in every circumstance upon the noun.”
 “The recent history for much of the US left and US feminism has
been a response to this kind of crisis by endless splitting and
searches for a new essential unity. But there has also been a growing
recognition of another response though coalition-affinity, not
identity”
 “Cyborg feminists have to argue that 'we' do not want any more
natural matrix of unity and that no construction is whole.”
Informatics of Domination
“The frame for my sketch is set by the extent
and importance of rearrangements in worldwide social relations tied to science and
technology.”
Haraway_CyborgManifesto.html
Haraway_CyborgManifesto.html
Representation
Representation
Bourgeois
novel,
Bourgeois
novel,realism
realism
Organism
Organism
Depth,
integrity
Depth,
integrity
Heat
Heat
Biology
asas
clinical
Biology
clinical practice
practice
Physiology
Physiology
Small
group
Small
group
Perfection
Perfection
Eugenics
Eugenics
Decadence,
Decadence,Magic
Magic Mountain
Mountain
Hygiene
Hygiene
Microbiology,
Microbiology,tuberculosis
tuberculosis
Organic
division
Organic divisionof
of labour
labour
Functional
specialization
Functional
specialization
Reproduction
Reproduction
Organic
sex
role
Organic
sex
rolespecialization
specialization
Bioogical
determinism
Bioogical
determinism
Community
ecology
Community
ecology
Racial
chain
of
Racial
chain
ofbeing
being
Scientific
management
inhome/
home/
Scientific
management in
factory
factory
Family/Market/Factory
Family/Market/Factory
Family
wage
Family
wage
Public/Private
Public/Private
Nature/Culture
Nature/Culture
Co-operation
Co-operation
Freud
Freud
SexSex
labour
labour
Mind
Mind
Second
World
Second
WorldWar
War
White
Capitalist
White CapitalistPatriarchy
Patriarchy
Simulation
Simulation
Science
fiction,
postmodernism
Science
fiction,
postmodernism
Biotic
Component
Biotic
Component
Surface,
boundary
Surface, boundary
Noise
Noise
Biology
as inscription
Biology
as inscription
Communications
engineering
Communications engineering
Subsystem
Subsystem
Optimization
Optimization
Population
Control
Population
Control
Obsolescence,
Obsolescence,
FutureFuture
Shock Shock
Stress
Management
Stress
Management
Immunology,
Immunology, AIDS AIDS
Ergonomics/cybernetics
Ergonomics/cybernetics
of labourof labour
Modular
construction
Modular
construction
Replication
Replication
Optimal
genetic
strategies
Optimal
genetic
strategies
Evolutionary
constraints
Evolutionary
inertia,inertia,
constraints
Ecosystem
Ecosystem
Neo-imperialism,
Neo-imperialism,
United United
Nations Nations
humanism
humanism
Global
factory/Electronid
Global
factory/Electronid
cottage cottage
Women
the Integrated
Women
in thein
Integrated
Circuit Circuit
Comparable
Comparable
worthworth
Cyborg
citizenship
Cyborg citizenship
fields
of difference
fields
of difference
Communicatins
enhancemenet
Communicatins enhancemenet
Lacan
Lacan
Genetic
engineering
Genetic
engineering
Robotics
Robotics
Artificial
Intelligence
Artificial
Intelligence
Wars
StarStar
Wars
Informatics
of Domination
Informatics of Domination
 “First, the objects on the right-hand side cannot be
coded as 'natural', a realization that subverts
naturalistic coding for the left-hand side as well.”
 “We cannot go back ideologically or materially.”
 “The cyborg is a kind of disassembled and
reassembled, postmodern collective and personal
self. This is the self feminists must code.”
“WOMEN IN THE INTEGRATED
CIRCUIT”
“I want to suggest the impact of the social relations mediated and enforced by
the new technologies in order to help formulate needed analysis and practical
work. However, there is no 'place' for women in these networks, only geometries
of difference and contradiction crucial to women's cyborg identities.”
 Home
 Market
 Paid Work Place
 State
 School
 Clinic-Hospital
 Church
“If we learn how to read these webs of power and social life, we might learn new
couplings, new coalitions.”
“The permanent partiality of feminist points of view has
consequences for our expectations of forms of political
organization and participation. We do not need a totality
in order to work well. The feminist dream of a common
language, like all dreams for a perfectly true language, of
perfectly faithful naming of experience, is a totalizing and
imperialist one. In that sense, dialectics too is a dream
language, longing to resolve contradiction.”
“Cybertyping and the Work of Race
in the Age of Digital Reproduction”
What are Cybertypes
“Distinctive ways that the Internet propagates, disseminates and
commodifies images of race and racism.”
“Cybertyping is the process by which computer/ human interfaces, the
dynamics and economics of access, and the means by which users are
able to express themselves online interacts with the “cultural layer" or
ideologies regarding race that they bring with them into cyberspace.”
“Cybertypes are the images of race that arise when the fears,
anxieties, and desires of privileged Western users (the majority of
Internet users and content producers are still from the Western
nations) are scripted into a textual/graphical environment that is in
constant flux and revision.”
Cybertypes and Benjamin
 “A rationale for the existence of racial cybertypes
become clear; in a virtual environment like the Internet
where everything is a copy, so to speak, and nothing has
an aura since cyber-images exist as pure pixelated
information, the desire to search for an original is
thwarted from the get go”
 “This is the paradox: in order to think rigorously,
humanely and imaginatively about virtuality and the
post human, it is absolutely necessary to ground critique
in the lived realities of the human, in all their
particularity and specificity.”
Remastering the Internet
 “Old media provide the foundation for the “new” and
its means of putting race to “work” in the service of
particular ideologies are re-invoked, with a twist, in the
new landscape of race in the digital age”
 “Groups such as racial and ethnic minorities who are
prone to being stereotyped in older media are now
being “remastered” to use more digital terminology,
ported to Cybertyping”
 Wheres the multi(cultularism) in multimedia?
 Where is race in new media?
 What is the work that race does in cyberspace, our
most currently privileged example of the
technology of digital reproduction
 What boundaries does it police
Digital Identity
 “Cyberspace and the images of identity that it produces can be seen as
an interior, mind’s eve projection of the real”
 “Cybertypes of the biotechnologically enhanced or perfected woman and
of the Internet’s invisible minorities, who can log onto the net and be
taken for “white” participate in an ideology of liberation from
marginalized bodies”
 “Machines which offer identity prostheses to redress the burdens of
physical handicaps such as age, gender, and race produce cybertypes
which look remarkably like racial and gender stereotypes
 “Chosen identities enabled by technology such as online avatars,
cosmetic and transgender surgery and body modifications and other
cyber-prostheses are not breaking the mold of unitary identity but rather
are shifting identity in the realm of the “virtual”
 “Bodies get tricky in cyberspace”