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1st:
The idea that we are all cyborgs, that we have, through mutations in media
and social organization, all become cyborgs, is developed and offered
as “an ironic political myth” urgent so as to counter the power of other
myths (for example the myth of "woman" or the myth of "man").
This ironic faith, her blasphemy, is “the image of the cyborg” (149) This myth is developed at the boundary between
s/f and social reality—where they fade into each other, there the distinction
between the two appears as an “optical illusion”.(149)
2nd:
The programmatic rejection of the heroic human myths of Origin and End (150-151; *177) Haraway offers a general schema
of the heroic masculine narrative: it passes through “original innocence,
individuation, separation, the birth of the self, the tragedy of autonomy,
the fall into writing, alienation, war, tempered by imaginary respite
in the bosom of the Other.” (177) In this plot “women” have “less selfhood,
weaker individuation, more fusion to the oral, to Mother, less at stake
in masculine autonomy”
3rd:
The breakdown of three distinctions (151-155): here Haraway challenges
to acknowledge that we cannot anymore secure the boundary between:
human / animal
human-animal / machine
non-physical / physical
4th:
The breakdown of these distinctions has made traditional conceptions of
identity untenable: e.g. woman cannot be named, generalized, totalized
around a particular set of features—because she is fractured by differences
(Western/non-Western; White/ colored; rich/ poor; lesbian/ straight/bisexual/transsexual;
...) that cannot be wished away à Solution: feminists should
give up the dream of purity, naivite, innocence and origin-ality.
5th:
The informatics of domination have developed to the point that a whole
new set of social practices are appropriate (list: 161-162): we could
see this system as part of a dystopic regime of control; but it also can
be seen as liberating and utopian: if the self is a cyborg, it/I can practice
a new kind of politics (163): “The cyborg is a kind of disassembled and
reassembled, postmodern collective and personal self.” [This is a
key rhetorical reversal: things looked bad... but now they evidence possibility.]
6th:
Work gets restructured as “home work” where all the places of the society
get changed (170-173)à these many social developments
mean that feminists should give up the metaphysical grounding of their
politics in female identities like mothering.
7th:
The cyborg myths can take us beyond the dualisms that have explained what
is human and non-human in the Western tradition: 177, 181.
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