Well what can I say about Donna Haraway? She’s crazy, insane, nuts, not to mention hard as hell to understand. I have to admit that of all the readings we’ve had, this was one of my least favorite. At the beginning of the semester a lot of the information was over my head, now I’m able to get a grasp on what I’m reading. This though, was as if I were starting over at the beginning of the semester. On that note, let’s begin.
I’m going to start with the fact that my first image while reading this was of Star Trek. My dad used to watch that show all the time when I was younger, and being the daddy’s girl that I am, I would watch with him. So all I could think of was the Borgs that appear on the show. (Yes, I still remember what happened, I’m sad, I know.) “A cyborg is a cybernetic organism, a hybrid of machine and organism, a creature of social reality as well as a creature of fiction,” (2269). Yay! Apparently Haraway also watched Star Trek. That really doesn’t make me feel better about myself, especially after I read the rest of her essay.
So the essay began with, “This essay is an effort to build an ironic political myth faithful to feminism, socialism, and materialism,” (2269). Right there, that made me want to stop reading. Did anyone else want to throw our lovely text book out the window?
I thought an interesting quote from Haraway was, “The self is the One who is not dominated, who knows that by the service of the other; the other is the one who holds the future, who knows that by the experience of domination, which gives the lie to the autonomy of the self,” (2296). She goes on to say that the One is all-powerful and all-knowing; in short, the One is God. Yet to be the “other” they are frayed and without boundaries. To me, this sort of goes against her talking about “Within this framework, teaching modern Christian creation should be fought as a form of child abuse,” (2271). She says how Christian creation should be fought, but yet in the other sentence she talks about how there is a “One” who is all powerful. This confuses the hell out of me here.
I felt that while Haraway was intelligent and well educated on the subject she was writing, boy was she boring and confusing as hell about it. I thought when I was going into the piece and it was titled “A Manifesto for Cyborgs: Science Technology, and Socialist Feminism in the 1980s” that it would be really interesting. She lost me at the first sentence.
I wrote the same thing you did–that I felt like I was back at square one when reading this. Being the optimist that I am, I like to think that our difficulty with this means that we’re reaching a new “level” of theory…and now that I just likened theory to video games…
I used to watch “Star Trek” with my dad too. The Next Generation, right? With Patrick Stewart as Captain Piccard? (Uh, I’m not a dork, what?) And that’s what I was trying to hold onto while reading Haraway, but I always felt it slipping away from me, as though the two never quite connected.
That’s interesting that you picked out Hawaray’s thoughts on the “One.” I must have skimmed right over that. I’m not too sure of what she means by the “One” either (Neo from “The Matrix” would be too easy, right?), but do you think that perhaps she’s not talking about God, but about the cyborg? Or maybe she’s proposing that the cyborg is God? Either way, I’m in the same boat as you…boo, Haraway.