Haraway's "Cyborg Manifesto"

I'm a bit perplexed with the chapter "Cyborg Manifesto" in Haraway's book. Yes, it's interesting that she's trying to combine notions of feminist and materialist theories with cyborgs. Yes, the feminist movement is fractured and it's important to think of ways of suturing the splinters together. Yes, it's interesting the way Haraway starts off the chapter with the notion of blasphemy as "ironic faith." But, I'm dubious as to how this fits in with Haraway's larger points of how "[cyborg] imagery can help express two crucial arguments in this essay: first, the production of the universal, totalizing theory is a major mistake that misses most of reality..." (316). Okay, let's look at that a little closer. Of course the use of essentialzing within theory can be complicated, reductive, and dismissive of other lived experiences. Yet what I feel is going on in this chapter is more of the same ol' same ol' in that narrative of the us's and the them's. Haraway even alludes, at one point, how we all have a tendency to talk about the us's and the them's: "It has become difficult to name one's feminism by a single adjective- or even to insist in every circumstance upon the noun" (296). For the majority of this particular page Haraway is talking about how the false dichotomy of the us's and the them's, while also hinting at one of her larger points that a "totalizing theory is a major mistake..." What I take issue with here is that she's making a strong point for how splintered feminism has become, how we could look more for the similarities rather than the differences, yet later she goes on to dismiss the notion of the we. Haraway furthers my umbridge by using lots of almost-but-not-quite scary quotes, for instance when she writes 'us.' It's jarring, but not in a productive way, but rather a dismissive and arrogant way. I think Haraway missed a great opportunity to call out factions and say, hey! The more we talk about the us's and the them's the more it splinters us, and the more the ideology survives to create the sexist, classist, racist world we live in.

I'm just fed up with the notion that we're all so different. "Men are from Mars; Women are from Venus." The ideologues want us to buy into these notions that we're worlds apart from one another; ideology works better when folks are alienated from what's important rather than in-tune with what is. So I'm bloody tired of hearing these narratives, particularly from folks who ostensibly try to build up a we narrative, only to knock it down right away. Take this bit from Haraway: "...and ironically corporate executives reading "Playboy" and anti-porn radical feminists will make strange bedfellows in jointly unmasking the irrationalism" (301). Seems like Haraway's trying to inspire a we narrative, but look closer at the sentiment. Haraway is setting up an assumption for her reader, one that makes the CEO a white male fat cat, and the radical feminist a white woman who's seen as a crazy person to the CEO. At least that's what I envision as I read and re-read that passage. But maybe it's reversed; maybe they're not white; and why think they're so far apart anyway? At the core, we're all human. And yes (to Haraway's point), it's tricky to universalize humans. But I argue that at our core, we're all the same. No matter where one lives; what cultural influence one has; etc. And what's universal about humans is that we all want to be loved, and we all avoid suffering. Now, it gets more complicated the more we branch out from the core, but I think that if we approached each human on that fundamental level, then it would change much of the interactions we have, and could lead to some real, indelible change. This is where I feel the major pitfall of Haraway's manifesto lays is that while she's arguing for a cyborg look at feminist et al. issues, to move away from the white male narrative, she's really driving it closer to the same ol' ideology that's persevered for eons. This makes me think of the Hayles book, particularly chapter five and her close read of "Limbo." I'm also tying this together with some of the stuff we talked about last week in class about how cyborgs tend to be white males. No one could come up with a non-white cyborg, and while there were a few woman cyborgs, they too weren't peoples of color. So while Haraway is trying to change the face, nature, and conversation surrounding theory, I feel she falls short of her goals by perpetuating some of the same stereotypes she's trying to dispell,

What I think we need to be doing more of is working to create the we narrative. To be inclusive rather than always keeping our eyes on the differences. Because I think it's the similarities between us humans that is more compelling than the differences. Just sayin'. 

Hayles's How We Became Post-Human

Hayles's book is super hard for me to pin-down with a summary. There's a lot of stuff here that I'm not fully understanding with this book, so Gentle Reader keep that in mind as we walk through this blog together. To sum up Post-Human, Hayles writes about the ways in which "information has lost its body" (2). She goes through different mediums to illustrate her points: from science, to digital technologies, to literary criticism, Hayles leaves no stone unturned. What I liked about the first couple of chapters is how Hayles describes what posthuman is. There's a great (although too lengthy to use here) definition on pages 2-3 where she fully lays out how she's defining posthuman. I hadn't really thought about how "information [loses] its body" when it goes digital. Coupling that with what posthuman is (mostly that is to say it's more than just humans modifying their bodies), gave me a new perspective on the conversations surrounding digital humanities. So far we've covered how online spaces shape us, how we shape them, and what it means to be human within those spaces. Here, Hayles is looking at how human and machine are one, yet different.

Quotes/Compelling Issues:


"Although the 'posthuman' differs in its articulations, a common theme is the union between human and machine" (2).

This business of posthuman is, of course, essential to understanding the larger points she brings up throughout her book. When I first read the title, not knowing anything about what posthuman means, I figured it's "after-human" that Hayles would be discussing. That may be part of it, but this quote is getting closer to what I think her book is about: again, how human and machine work together, and how they differ. I'm getting closer to understanding the ideas Hayles posits, but it's still difficult for me to soundbite this back to a reader.

"[...]Haves of sentences spoken at different times can be amalgamated to let a speaker hear himself say the opposite of what he knows he said" (Roy Walker qtd. in Hayles, 210). This is regarding how record recordings, particularly on tape, can change what a person says.

What a super weird (and cool) idea! It's something anyone, with the right equipment and the right mind to do so, can create an alternate information that's separate from both the body of the person speaking, but how the technical/digital part can also be segmented apart, and put together in a different order. Hmm, that may not make much sense, so let's explore this further... What, I think, Hayles is talking about here through Walker is not how stuff can be edited to make anyone say anything, but rather differentiates how information becomes disembodied (a word she uses a lot, so riffing off of her). With this quote in particular, Hayles shows how tricky disembodies information is; that it's fluid.

"...displaces one definition of 'human' with another but also in a more disturbingly literal sense that envisions humans displaced as the dominate form of life on the planet by intelligent machines" (283). Hayles is writing about how posthuman invokes both "terror and pleasure" (283).


After reading this bit, I was skeptical about how much of this could be true. Can machines be intelligent enough on their own that they'll supersede humans? Doesn't this kind of intelligence rely on human intervention to survive (be it at the creation point, or to continue functioning)? This reminds me of T.V. Reed's book with regard to the notion that we shouldn't be super-suspicious, nor super-willing to buy into the idea that technology-in all its incarnations- will be the ruin/the saving grace for humans. This quote is straddling the line of being too suspicious of technology. No wait, I take that back. Its gone over the line and over the precipice. Now I just read the quote again. Maybe it's the case that machines have taken over in the less nefarious sense of our dependence on them makes life as we Americans know it possible. There's not a moment that goes by where I'm not using some machine to do something. Obviously I'm typing right now on a computer that's hooked up to the Internet (disembodied information).

Overall, what I found to be the most compelling about this book is how Hayles is taking the philosophical view of how we find our body, and applies that to posthumanism. It's impossible to find the body: if a person's arms are missing, it's not as if she ceases to have a body. Same applies with information in digital spaces.   

Class Yesterday

Whoop. I totally forgot to blog about class yesterday, so I'm doing this now!

I got some feedback on folks about my writing center paper. I've been thinking about, rather than taking the one with one to one with many, changing that to one with a few. Specifically looking at how to do this work within studio classes like the 102 groups we have at WSU. So, we knocked around a few ideas, and I got a chance to talk out some of what's in my head.

Article Blog # 2

I have come, Gentle Reader, to that part of the semester where my brain is having more and more trouble with producing understandable pieces of prose. I’m fried, in other words. So, for this week’s blog I’m doing an old-fashioned pull-a-quote-and-respond type of analysis. Proceed with caution…

From the Berry et al. book:

Ethnographic practices…need to consider how the classroom is a location that connects to other locations, locations that subjects constantly inhabit, dwell in, and move between" (p. 210). In other words, we need to move beyond the classroom while holding on to pedagogical concerns.

Stopped really paying attention pretty much right after coming across this quote. Rhet folks don’t truly do ethnography; in order to do that, they’d have to be students again, and I don’t see it happening.

From Rubria and Gil-Egui article:

“The first has to do with the change it has caused in the definition of the public opinion’s agenda within Cuba. The first has to do with the change it has caused in the definition of the public opinion’s agenda within Cuba” (154).

This is continual within and throughout Castells book: that social networks have shaped the ways in which a public sees its society. This is much like what the occupy movement gave, I believe, to Americans: that now we have a different discourse that surrounds how we talk about the rich versus the poor.

 “Your blog provides the world a unique window into the realities of daily life in Cuba” (Obama qtd 157).

I don’t remember something like this coming up in Castells’s book, that is, to have a leader of a country praise the work on a blogger.

“Lamrani raises questions about Sanchez’s ability to maintain Generation Y without strong financial and technical support from foreign agencies, pinpoints what he deems to be inconsistencies in Sánchez’s accounts of harassment by the Cuban government  and finally accuses her of profiting from her critical position regarding Cuba’s current affairs” (157).

It’s true that blogs and such can have an unfair slant to the writing. But then, what writing doesn’t? From the words journalists use, to the networks/publications they work for, every bit of political news we consume is going to have some sort of slant to it. So, what becomes crucial here is to ask those rhetorical ethnographic questions of: for whom is this text written, under what circumstance, and for what purpose. While it may be true that no news is impartial or purely objective, I do believe there are truer things out there. It’s something I don’t think enough folks think about; it was hinted within this article and not really found at all within Castells’s book, that it’s our job to choose carefully whose truth we buy into.

“…the majority of respondents saw the Internet as a discursive medium, rather than as a way of becoming involved in ‘real’ collective action or shaping policymaking” (159).

Yes, point very well taken. Castells was remiss in not fully excavating how the social movements were constructed online. There was a bit of this sentiment in the beginning of the Castells book, but this quote hits home more for me because of how social networking sites are typically used, consumed, and viewed. I can see how folks would consider this not the real work of social action, but rather as a hobby. I mean, that’s how facebook, twitter, and others are often used: as the coffee house philosopher. A place where people can say stuff, and get people to respond, but we don’t think enough about how these are sites for conversation; should they also be sites of action?

“Regarding social issues, the loss of civic values and the need for an unrestricted dialogue among all Cubans, both inside and outside the country, are stressed” (162).

It’s rather fascinating how this is a common thread to all social movements, that is, the loss of having basic rights as a human as the impetus behind folks gathering together for change. Castells is right when he writes about how when fear is removed, folks start banding together. It’s a shame it doesn’t happen more often. I think about the ways I was motivated by fear at the insurance company I worked at; I think about the ways in which some not-so-nice folks still try to control me with fear. At one point in the article, Rubria and Gil-Egui write about apathy of the masses. Fear is a good way of creating and sustaining that inertia, because if we didn’t feel like we’re replaceable, if we didn’t fear that we’d lose jobs, if we didn’t fear what others think about our writing, then maybe change would come and stay awhile. Just a thought.

Blog # 5

Overview:

For Manuel Castells's Networks of Outrage and Hope, Castells maps out how current social movements work within the internet age. Castells starts with exploring power dynamics that are the catalyst for social movements; to unpacking how nascent social movements are started when people feel they belong to a group that has the same desires and goals;  then moves to how the social movements From Egypt to America have been shaped and pushed forward by sites like youtube and facebook.  The overall argument is that social movements may not exclusively be held within these online spaces, but these spaces are necessary to look and think about as we enter a new era of social justice (105).

Quotes:

"Coercion and intimidation...are essential mechanisms for imposing the will of those in control of the institutions of power" (4). I love this quote because it reminds me of a lyric from Bob Dylan, in which the great D sings:"One of the boss's hangers-on/Comes to call at times you least expect/Try to bully ya-strong arm you- inspire you with fear/Sometimes it has the opposite effect." I like this quote with regard to this class for two reasons: it's one of the points Castells brings up that has effected me, and it's important to note how social movements are generated in order to understand Castells's book at large. In Nebraska I used to work at an insurance company where one of the head bosses would do a sweep through of the department I worked in. It was a lot like what Dylan was rapping about: she was trying to catch folks on the internet so she could tell our direct boss about it, who would then relay the message to the offender. I'm now in a position where I have more agency over the work I do, and it's much nicer than having someone try to inspire me with fear. Gramsci writes about how when consent is withdrawn, the state flexes. I believe that. Once we get rid of the fear of being fired (been there), of being laughed out of the academy (seriously, I was told this), of knowing that you're being disrespected but feel like you can't do anything about it, once that fear is removed change happens. And it's scary for the powers that be. This quote is important with regard for Castells's overall argument because he reminds us that social movements happen once folks are pushed too far with intimidation and fear, bringing folks together for social change.

"[with regard to the movements in Iceland and Tunisia] In both cases, mobile phones and social networks on the Internet played a major role in spreading images and messages that mobilized people in providing a platform for debate..." (45). Again, I like this quote because it's one of the points I found most compelling in Castells's book, and ties in nicely to his point of how social movements are shaped and driven by social networks. Just like with the 2008 presidential election, regular folks are able to post videos to youtube and facebook to show a different, less subjective view of what's going on with the world. I was living in Lincoln, NE when the occupy movement first got started in NYC. Eventually, as all things have a way of doing, Lincoln had an occupy chapter as well. This iteration of the occupy movement was located in an open space right next to the insurance company I mentioned above. I was attending UNL, which was a short distance from where I worked, and almost daily I would walk by the protesters: reading their signs, listening in on snippets of conversations. One day I decided to talk with one of these folks, and got the information I needed to walk in one of their protests. It was a chilly Saturday morning in November that I laced up my sneakers and went to join the occupy movement. Castells's writes about the movement as having a change your bank day, and that's the day that I happened to march. We walked around the governor's mansion (who happened to be entertaining guests that day), and then down to the Wells Fargo where we proceed to occupy their lobby. Before I had seen with my own eyes what the occupy movement was about, I had read a lot of comments in the local newspaper's online website from folks who didn't understand what the movement was about. I too was worried that the protesters would do something- get pushed too hard by police, or by-standards- causing folks to get seriously hurt and shutting down the whole movement. But once I marched with the other protesters, I realized that it was a completely non-violent group. At one point when we were outside of Wells Fargo, someone yelled, "Fuck the police!" and one of the organizers shut that down quick by saying, "We don't talk to the police that way. They have been very nice to us and we have no reason not to treat them in the same manner." It was interesting, scanning the faces of the protesters: some older, some younger, yet mostly all white. There were even a few professors from UNL that joined the group, but I didn't know any of them personally. We were heckled by a few folks, but mostly people waived or ignored us completely. Maybe the occupy movement didn't last. Maybe it wasn't really supposed to, but what it did do for us is shape the discourse surrounding the rich and the poor.

"Thus the occupy movement was built on a new form of space, a mixture of space of places, in a given territory, and space of flows on the Internet. One could not function without the other..." (168). Again, ties into Castells's larger point of how the social platforms changed the way that social movements were able to take place. Now, folks could be apart of the movement without necessarily getting out of their chairs. This may sound lazy on the outside, but for folks who can't/don't get around easily (and even if they can), the word of occupy movement was able to spread. And it shaped the discourse of a generation.

Blog # 4

This blog post may feel a bit informal, which I hope isn't off-putting to you Gentle Reader. This is a hodge-podge of quotes from Nakamura's Cybertypes and Kristin Arola's It's My Revolution: Learning to See the Mixblood. Here we go:

Nakamura:

“The study of racial cybertypes bring together the cultural layer and the computer layer; that is to say, cybertyping is the process by which computer/human interfaces, the dynamics and economics of access, and the means by which users are able to express themselves online…” (3).

To put this into my own words, cybertypes are the ways in which people of color are viewed online, access issues that accompany the Internet, and how well people of color are able to show their identities online (this can be with regard to avatars, representation/non-representation in video games, or stereotypes of people of color-to name a few).

“I propose that a starting place for reseeing the mixedblood in contemporary terms is to look online to the spaces where users are asserting their identities in ways that illustrate not only the existence and persistence of the mixedblood, but whose visual, aural, and textual choices illustrate the complexities of this category and the embodied nature of the online self” (217).

Again, in my own words I rephrase this as: Let’s look at how people are rhetorically constructing their identities online, and how they chose to race or not race themselves based on their choices. I find this to be more compelling than Nakamura’s cybertyping in, although it’s only 12 years old- way young in human years, it’s already passé for online studies (not in its entirety, but some of the online spaces Nakamura looked at aren’t in vogue anymore). So now we have online communities such as Facebook, where folks can make certain choices about how they want to represent themselves. The Arola article got me thinking about my own: if a person was just creeping on my facebook page, and didn’t know me from Adam, what would they assume about me? I don’t use an actual photo of myself (it’s the panting of Girl with a Pearl Earring only instead of the girl in question, it’s a bulldog’s face). I do have my gender on there for all to see, but I don’t let the public see much more than that. So, what race would they guess I am?

So, whereas Nakamura is suggesting to shift the paradigm of how people of color are represented in online spaces “is to use its own metaphors against itself” (48), Arola makes the call to see how, in this case, mixbloods are representing themselves online, and to look rhetorically on the choices they are making to think through issues of race and identity.

Arola: “This “un-seeing” of Indians exists in part by the denial or brushing over of America’s bloody past and also through the belief that “real” Indians only exist in the stereotypes of what an Indian should look like, act like, and believe in. This act of unseeing comes with a host of problems for full-blooded Indians, including an unseeing by those in power of the political, economic, and social issues relevant to today’s Native American” (215).

Nakamura: “The idea of a nonstereotyped Asian male identity is so seldom enacted in LambdaMOO that its absence can only be read as a symptom of suppression” (39).

What I like about these two closely-related quotes is how stereotyped people of color are within popular culture. Riffing of off Arola’s thought, I too have notice that you never see an American Indian represented in street clothes, but rather always in full regalia; the spectacle of the Other, as Nakamura talks about throughout her book. This is much like how Asians are played onscreen: from Bruce Lee to Bai Ling, there’s a certain look Asian actors are supposed to have. It really is “a trap that fetishizes what it means to be American Indian” (216).  

Blog Post # 3

In Lisa Nakamura's Cybertypes, she is filling in the gap left over from new media studies. Nakamura examines the push from new media studies to separate from humanities to become "a separate, autonomous field, where the historical, aesthetic, cultural and discursive aspects of digitalization of our society may be examined" (Aarseth qtd in Nakamura, 3). The particular gap Nakamura fills in the thought that the Internet is a Utopian place where racism, sexism, ethnocentrism, and all other -ism's are eradicated. She introduces the idea of cybertype, "to describe the distinctive way that the Internet propagates, disseminates, and commodifies images of race and racism" (3). Nakamura supports her claim that the Internet isn't a classless, raceless space by looking at how different websites operate by looking at the ways in which different spaces occupy and use cybertype. For example, Nakamura goes into identity tourism, where superficially it appears as these spaces open up avenue's for folks to be who they want without scrutiny. Identity tourists are able to create avatars, where tourists can pick out what race, what hair color, what eye color, etc. they want to have. As Nakamura points out, the problem with identity tourism is that it gives a myopic view of what it means to be another ethnicity, and often leads to stereotyping (33-34).
Nakamura then turns to cyberpunk fiction, both the first and second iterations. She does a fascination job of analyzing the movies Blade Runner, Neuromancer (as examples of first wave cyberpunk), Snow Crash, and The Matrix (as examples of second wave cyberpunk). This section was my favorite of all the book. Nakamura's analysis of how The Matrix works as an anti-racist movie had me thinking about it in a whole new way: "...rather than a place in which race is "transcended" or represented solely by white actors...we are shown a world in which race is not only visible but necessary for human liberation" (73). Love this. Too often movies are whitewashed and the justification is always that white is all colors, so therefore white actors portray all races. Hmm...
I was struck with Nakamura's statement that all cyberpunk has an Asian aesthetic to it. I hadn't considered how futuristic movies have karate moves and Asian-inspired clothing. But it makes sense when Nakamura brings this up that it's a subtle way
My second favorite part of Cybertupes was the chapter regarding headhunting. Nakamura does a short close read on the movie Aliens where she writes about how the body is under attack by "both the antihuman (the alien) and the passing-as-human (the cyborg) seek to gain entry and colonize the character Ripley's human body" (45). Nakamura doesn't go into the gender implications of this, but she does make an interesting point of how xenophobia is played out within cyberpunk movies and cyber sites.
These two chapters are where I feel Nakamura's defense of her claim that cyber places are still raced are the strongest. It's the way she goes into close reading these spaces that I was exposed to a different way of viewing what was going on under the visage of something else (e.g. "strong woman lead" in Aliens, yet there's a good case of how it's propaganda against the Soviets at the time). Overall, I found this book to be compelling. There may have been times where Nakamura was reaching a bit too far with some of her analysis [e.g. when Nakamura's in a chat site and her avatar is dark-skinned. A blonde-hair, light-skin woman give Nakamura a light-skinned head for her avatar as if this is irrefutable proof that the woman is trying to say that white skin is better (52)], but she does the vigorous rhetoric that's needed to unpack and unearth the ways in which the color line is visible on Internet and cyberpunk spaces.