Questions for Becoming Insect:
Architecture Group:
The military interest in the cyborg is obvious enough with overt attempts at merging individual soldiers into machine bodies and electronically linked networks of thinking, but is this process also unfolding in relation to consumers and what advantages and disadvantages does such a metamorphosis offer? Please provide visual or other examples.
Craftavism:
Haraway argues that the intentional fiction of the cyborg as a new, unspecified hybrid being also allows those most oppressed by past tradition, including many women and children and people of color, to re-imagine themselves and their place within society, but how would you say artists might play a crucial role in this process of re-imagining of identity, and is it always a positive thing to attempt? Please provide visual or other examples.
mimicry:
Cyborg bodies expand the physical of individuals giving them superior vision and hearing, insect-like strength and defenses, and perhaps even the ability to be more flexible in how they define their gender or race, but what does all this mean for the very concept of the human being? To put this a bit differently, what are the advantages and disadvantages of becoming insect? Please provide visual or other examples.
Fashion:
How might the purported emergence of the “post-human” (the cyborg, insect-hive being, the animal-human-hyrbid) impact ethics and citizenship? What kind of society would evolve from a world no longer pivoted on the idea of humans as the center of the world? How would “nature” and notions of environmental justice be changed? Please provide visual or other examples.
Some excerpts from Donna Haraway, “A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century,” in Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (New York; Routledge, 1991), pp.149-181.
http://www.stanford.edu/dept/HPS/Haraway/CyborgManifesto.html
• A cyborg is a cybernetic organism, a hybrid of machine and organism, a creature of social reality as we as a creature of fiction.
• Contemporary science fiction is full of cyborgs – creatures simultaneously animal and machine, who populate worlds ambiguously natural and crafted.
• Modern medicine is also full of cyborgs, of couplings between organism and machine, each conceived as coded devices.
• By the late twentieth century, our time, a mythic time, we are all chimeras, theorized and fabricated hybrids of machine and organism; in short, we are cyborgs. Thus cyborg is our ontology; it gives us our politics. The cyborg is a condensed image of both imagination and material reality, the two joined centers structuring any possibility of historical transformation.
• This chapter is an argument for pleasure in the confusion of boundaries and for responsibility in their construction.
• The cyborg skips the step of original unity, of identification with nature in the Western sense. This is its illegitimate promise that might lead to subversion of its teleology as starwars.
• The cyborg is resolutely committed to partiality, irony, intimacy, and perversity. It is oppositional, utopian, and completely without innocence. No longer structured by the polarity of public and private, the cyborg defines a technological polls based partly on a revolution of social relations in the oikos, the household.
• Unlike the hopes of Frankenstein’s monster, the cyborg does not expect its father to save it through a restoration of the garden.
• The eyborg does not dream of community on the model of the organic family, this time without the oedipal project. The cyborg would not recognize the Garden of Eden; it is not made of mud and cannot dream of returning to dust. Perhaps that is why I want to see if eyborgs can subvert the apocalypse of returning to nuclear dust in the manic compulsion to name the Enemy. Cyborgs are not reverent; they do not re-member the cosmos.
• 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.
• From one perspective, a cyborg world is about the final imposition of a grid of control on the planet, about the final abstraction embodied in a Star Wars apocalypse waged in the name of defence, about the final appropriation of women’s bodies in a masculinist orgy of war (Sofia, 1984). From another perspective, a cyborg world might be about lived social and bodily realities in which people are not afraid of their joint kinship with animals and machines, not afraid of permanently partial identities and contradictory standpoints.
• Cyborg imagery can suggest a way out of the maze of dualisms in which we have explained our bodies and our tools to ourselves. This is a dream not of a common language, but of a powerful infidel heteroglossia. It is an imagination of a feminist speaking in tongues to strike fear into the circuits of the supersavers of the new right. It means both building and destroying machines, identities, categories, relationships, space stories. Though both are bound in the spiral dance, I would rather be a cyborg than a goddess.