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B2 W1: Somatechnics - Seminar

Cyborgs and somatechnics 

Donna Haraway - A Cyborg Manifesto

Ironic political myth, irony as a rhetorical strategy and political method

The cyborg exists in a post-gender world and it cannot reproduce itself

Irony in the text - irony as a tool that pulls together things that need to be together but also are incompatible at the same time
The living and the non-living together - the breaking of boundaries
Postmodernism irony - taking two seemingly stated facts that seem to be at adds and placing them together
Blending of fact and fiction is a way to overcome oppression - optical illusion of a boundary between them - appreciate that boundary - political method
Irony in the form of a manifesto - philosophical piece but also manifesto for cyborgs - specific context she is speaking to (socialist/biologist/marxist feminists)
Too provocative to get published - took a while to get it published - pushback from socialist feminists and technophobic feminists

Language is a form of constituting reality - a technology of communication and a creation of the world we live in - epistemology - how we understand the world is already constitutive of the world - poststructuralist philosophy - language is not neutral, it is embedded in power - speaking to language as a way of establishing power relations in our life

How technoogy allows us to orient ourselves in the world - Wikipedia, google maps - before internet technology was the library - the meaning making as partners

There are no pure origins
We are never proper human subjects/full embodiments

The cyborg is no seduction to organic wholeness - moving away from the unmarked fixed starting point - irony "single vision produces worse illusions than double vision and many headed monsters" (Haraway) links to situated knowledges - multiple visions - vision in a critical way

 Why should bodies end at our skin? Haraway asks - why are our bodies only at skin level, they are also the microbes, waste, water. How can we say we are human if we can't grasp the essence of the human? We shouldn't grasp it but see it as a group of multiple actors. The skin is porous.

 Affinity instead of identity politics - there is another way, to address specific issues. Affinity - what am I trying to do/change I want to make - make connections based on change you want to make 

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