| Chapter 1: | An Introduction to Polarity, Ambiguity, and Kinship |
|
|
This is a limited free preview of this book. Please buy full access.
machine and organism, a creature of social reality as well as a creature of fiction’ (p. 149), undergirds this myth. Haraway said of this metaphor for the postmodernist, this political play of identity, this lived reality of new technology, ‘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’ (p. 150). Her intention was to unsettle her readers; she claimed, ‘acknowledging the agency of the world in knowledge makes room for some unsettling possibilities … [and it] makes room for surprises and ironies at the heart of all knowledge production’ (p. 199). This means that the cyborg, of course, thoroughly questions what is ‘natural’, for in Haraway’s paradigm, nature melds with technology and muddles the ostensibly firm borders between them.
Although Haraway’s intention was to point to the ambiguity that undoes long-standing nature-culture binaries, she also pointed to the ways in which these might be called into question prior to the age of the cyborg. She specifically called into question those ‘comfortable old hierarchical dominations’ by contrasting some of these ‘comfortable’ things against ‘scary new networks’ (p. 161). One assumes organisms, physiology, and sex to be natural because they are embedded so thoroughly into the Western cultural consciousness. Things such as biotic components, communications engineering, and genetic engineering cannot be coded as natural in such a consciousness, but the fact that they cannot calls into question the naturalness of those comfortable categories of organisms, physiology, and sex. Such comfortable categories cannot be ‘returned to’:
The ‘goddess’ is dead, too, because Haraway’s insight here is a critique of the false organic self which some radical feminists use as a basis for