Today’s Plan:
- Eyman Project
- Haraway Context/Reading
- For Next Tuesday: Haraway Write-Up
Eyman Project
We’ll start this on Thursday. I want to do one more difficult reading first.
For Next Session
A rather long and complicated (but rich) essay. Donna Haraway’s Cyborg Manifesto. Let me try and provide some context. The essay opens with:
This essay is an effort to build an ironic political myth faithful to
feminism, socialism, and materialism. Perhaps more faithful as
blasphemy is faithful, than as reverent worship and identifica-
tion. Blasphemy has always seemed to require taking things
very seriously.
Some questions:
- Why ironic?
- Does “political myth” here mean “ideology” (probably?)
- What is the opposite of feminism?
- What is the opposite of socialism? (Duh, capitalism–that’s an easy one)
- What is the opposite of materialism? [Essentialism, but what is essentialism]
- What is up with blasphemy?
Let me also pull up the course description to this course:
This course explores emerging scholarship on writing and design technologies. Beyond exposing students to applications that they will encounter as professional writers, the course explores the ontological, epistemological, material, and ethical transformations that new communicative technologies engender.
Let’s talk through those three terms across Haraway’s terms.
- Ontology: What is real? How do we know something is real? From whence [where/when] comes reality? [And the big question here is transcendence vs materialism]
- Epistemology: What is knowledge? [and, ontologically: does knowledge exist, from whence comes knowledge? The concepts can get messily intertwined] What are the sources of our knowledge? What do we know? What differentiates knowledge from wisdom and opinion?
- Ethics: From whence come morals? How do I decide what to do when morals come in conflict? To whom am I obligated? What are the extents of my obligations? How do we balance obligation and personal freedom?
Okay, one last set of terms and concepts:
- Self: This is messy. But let us say that the self is conscious-self-recognition of who we are and what we vaule. To become a self is to be self-aware. To be an agent capable of independent thought and action. The Modern Enlightenment (think: Locke, Hume, Kant, Nietzsche kinda but maybe not) sought to emancipate individuals from the tyranny of dogma, to be free thinkers. To mature, to become selves. Let’s read.
- Subject: Subject is a postmodern term that responds and often critiques the idea of self. How? Let’s talk.
- Agency: Let’s talk.
Okay, a few more terms / concepts.
What is an Oedipal narrative? This is a psychoanalytic term that comes from Freud’s reading of Oedipus Rex. I want get into the weird Freudian reading. But in Haraway it is meant to signal a narrative of male empowerment, one in which a man is able to solve his problem, win a woman, and save his world. For Lacan, the Oedipal desire is caught up in a desire for Symbolic Order, to inhabit a world that is structured and ordered, to live in parallel with what the world orders. Which, um, no one ever does (thus, in the eyes of the Father, the representative of Symbolic Order, we are always, already pervert, deviant, bad child).
A Quintessential 20th century question: what is technological determinism. In short, that technology drives social change, that it becomes if not the sole force directing history, at least the driver at the front of the bus. In “QCT,” Heidegger suggests that technology reshapes how humans think of themselves and the world. But he also sees the possibility of humans reshaping technology and their relation to it. We might say that for Heidegger, technology reshapes but does not determine. Most “hard” techno-determinists were more fatalist, and more Marxist, and feared that technology was quickly becoming a force that could not be resisted or reshaped. Even “soft” techno-determinists saw it as the central agent of social/political practice. Take Lelia Green, a scholar of the mythos of what she calls technoculture, writes:
“This ‘idea of progress’ or ‘doctrine of progress’ is centralized around the idea that social problems can be solved by technological advancement, and this is the way that society moves forward. Technological determinists believe that “‘You can’t stop progress’, implying that we are unable to control technology”
While Haraway will argue in favor of cybernetic ontology, epistemology, and ethics, she is *not* a techno-determinist, and believes techno-determinism is an Oedipal fantasy of control and order (the Father will save us / there are no fathers, only sons).
One last thing. How can we fit Heidegger into the matrix I’ve laid out above?
Ontologically, Heidegger has little belief in “essences.” Heidegger is a materialist in the sense that we build the world and the way we build the world in turn builds us. There’s no permanent essence of human being uniting us across time and space. To be human is to be in an ever-changing emergence of human being. Humans become in a material world they have constructed, and the way they constructed that world changes what they become.
I do not think “Question Concerning Technology” has much to say about the epistemological questions above. But clearly Heidegger influenced writers like Lyotard and Bill Readings, which in turn influenced (pretty heavily) the rant that I read you in class. My ideas about learning (as a becoming) rather than teaching (as a transference of knowledge) are rooted in the Heideggerian inflection of “being” as a verb, of becoming, and its rejection of “being” as a permanent essence or existent. (This is Levinas’ language: that we are not existents but are always transformed through the act of existing).
Ethically, Heidegger pushes for a local relationship. Remember that his interpretation of the fourfold thinks creating as a local act, “a gathering” of materials, purposes, users, cultural value, etc. We do not create merely to sell and profit. We create to gather those around us, to show our care for the very act of creating and the “world” that offers us the opportunity to create. Our obligation is to that world. The world is not transcendent, it is not a God to whom we owe reverence. But is it an entity, a greater whole, to which we owe care.
I lay this out because I think you will hear traces of Heidegger in Haraway.
Next Tuesday: Haraway reading and write-up.
I leave you to imagine your own question for this write-up. Haraway’s essay is complicated but, I think, rather inspiring.
I have one requirement: in a paragraph, spend some time with a 3-5 sentence passage. Close read it. Pick it apart. Look up some terms. And think about some way, any way, that we can put it in conversation with ChatGPT.
If you cannot think of an AI question, here’s one. Take this rather long sample from the near the essay’s conclusion:
Monsters have always defined the limits of community in Western imaginations. The Centaurs and Amazons of ancient Greece established the limits of the centered polis of the Greek male human by their disruption of marriage and boundary pollutions of the warrior with animality and woman. Unseparated twins and hermaphrodites were the confused human material in early modern France who grounded discourse on the natural and supernatural, medical and legal, portents and diseases—all crucial to establishing modern identity. In the evolutionary and behavioral sciences, monkeys and apes have marked the multiple boundaries of late-twentieth- century industrial identities. Cyborg monsters in feminist science fiction define quite different political possibilities and
limits from those proposed by the mundane fiction of Man and Woman.There are several consequences to taking seriously the imagery of cyborgs as other than our enemies. Our bodies, ourselves; bodies are maps of power and identity. Cyborgs are no exception. A cyborg body is not innocent; it was not born in a garden; it does not seek unitary identity and so generate antagonistic dualisms without end (or until the world ends); it takes irony for granted. One is too few, and two is only one possibility. Intense pleasure in skill, machine skill, ceases to be a sin, but an
aspect of embodiment. The machine is not an it to be animated, worshipped, and dominated. The machine is us, our processes, an aspect of our embodiment. We can be responsible for machines; they do not dominate or threaten us. We are responsible
for boundaries; we are they. Up till now (once upon a time), female embodiment seemed to be given, organic, necessary; and female embodiment seemed to mean skill in mothering and its metaphoric extensions. Only by being out of place could we take intense pleasure in machines, and then with excuses that this was organic activity after all, appropriate to females. Cyborgs might consider more seriously the partial, fluid, sometimes aspect of sex and sexual embodiment. Gender might not be global identity after all, even if it has profound historical breadth and depth.
Here Haraway celebrates how the relation to the machine might liberate women (and men) from the pre-existing gender roles that structure their relation to technology and, in turn, themselves. She implicitly associates this relation–woman and machine–in terms of the historical “monsters” (some fictive like the Centaur, some real like the hermaphrodites) that, through opposition, reinforce what it means to be a real, healthy man.
Okay, if you are still with me, then think about what she is claiming in the bold passages above. And think about whether you believe AI would be potentially liberatory in the ways that she frames “the machine” throughout the essay (and especially in her descriptions of women and/in science fiction).
