https://edc15.education.ed.ac.uk/njenkins/2015/01/22/haraways-cyborg-manifesto/ "If you could see what I have seen with your eyes ..." Wed, 11 Mar 2015 14:20:17 +0000 hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=4.2.38 https://edc15.education.ed.ac.uk/njenkins/2015/01/22/haraways-cyborg-manifesto/#comment-15 Mon, 26 Jan 2015 13:10:38 +0000 http://edc15.education.ed.ac.uk/njenkins/?p=100#comment-15 Nick, I also found this a really well-done summary of the manifesto, and Katherine’s examples from the film festival give it extra force. One of the readings we have looked at in previous years, though not this one so far, is Katherine Hayles’ response to Haraway in which, while acknowledging the force of Haraway’s argument, she suggests that the cyborg’s focus on bodily augmentation and modification doesn’t go quite far enough for the more subtle algorithmic workings of contemporary digital culture, 20 years on. The paper is well worth a read – you can find it here:
http://www.sagepub.com/rose/Docs/Hayles.pdf

]]> https://edc15.education.ed.ac.uk/njenkins/2015/01/22/haraways-cyborg-manifesto/#comment-12 Fri, 23 Jan 2015 08:42:51 +0000 http://edc15.education.ed.ac.uk/njenkins/?p=100#comment-12 Hi Nick!
I really got excited about Haraway’s Cyborg Manifesto in IDEL, and I think this is a great recap. I also like the way the Manifesto explores ways of being feminist that can be intersectional with other kinds of disadvantage (like race or class).
In a later book, Modest_witnesss@second_millenium , Haraway uses this concept to reflect on the many people who make technological advances happen (all the lab assistants, cleaners, admin staff, grants officers, security, post-docs etc) who tend to get written out of the story of ‘great discoveries’–it’s a lot of white men getting Nobel Prizes, on the labour of a lot of invisible people.
This can be really useful to help us, say, watch the films in the first festival. How come it’s a white guy who gets to be the hero of the story (with a stereotypical white-haired man in a lab coat as the lead scientist), and not the Hispanic hacker or the woman who found a way to contact her boyfriend and rescue him? How come it was the white humanoid robot who got to drive the Cadillac down the Pacific Highway, while the brown-monster robot drove the mouse-engine?
I would LOVE to read someone assessing the character of Rachael (the replicant in Blade Runner not shown in the clip in the festival) as a cyborg through Haraway’s essay.
That was four unconnected responses, but her essay is so useful because it generates so many questions of our own!

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