Saturday, May 19, 2018

                                              WARNING !
CYBORG  TRIGGERING MAY AWAKEN DREAD  CTHULHU TOO

Monstrous, Duplicated, Potent
Donna Haraway. Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene.[sic] Duke, 2016.      ALYSSA BATTISTONI
THE FIRST TIME I encountered Donna Haraway, in 2010, I was a graduate student in England doing a one-year master’s in geography. The program — a cash cow for the university, I eventually realized — was an odd mix of critical theory and environmental-management advice. Readings alternated between Bruno Latour and lectures from BP executives about their sustainability program...for a young woman struggling to understand the world after Hurricane Katrina and a global financial crisis, Haraway beckoned...
In 1982, the Marxist journal Socialist Review — asked Haraway to write five pages on the priorities of socialist feminism in the Reagan era. Haraway responded with thirty... published in 1985 as “A Manifesto for Cyborgs: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the 1980s,” though it has been known colloquially as the Cyborg Manifesto ever since...
The Manifesto offered a new politics for this new economy. Prescient about the need to organize the feminized, if not always female, sectors, Haraway explicitly called leftists to support SEIU District 925, a prominent campaign to unionize office workers. She also criticized the idea of a universal subject, whether held up by Marxists (the proletarian) or radical feminists (the woman). A new politics had to be constructed ..
In place of old political formations, Haraway imagined new cyborgian ones. She hoped that “the unnatural cyborg women making chips in Asia and spiral dancing in Santa Rita Jail” would together “guide effective oppositional strategies.” Her paradigmatic “cyborg society” was the Livermore Action Group, an antinuclear activist group targeting the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory,.. “committed to building a political form that actually manages to hold together witches, engineers, elders, perverts, Christians, mothers, and Leninists long enough to disarm the state.”
What set the Manifesto apart from other reconceptions of feminism was its embrace of science... its famous closing line: “I would rather be a cyborg than a goddess.”
Who wouldn’t? The cyborg’s popularity was no doubt fueled in part by the vision of a bionic babe it suggested — a Furiosa or the Terminator — though it couldn’t be further from her meaning... she has grown weary of its success, admonishing readers that “cyborgs are critters in a queer litter, not the Chief Figure of Our Times.”