References and Notes - Main Theorists

Donna Haraway

Cyborg Manifesto

This is a struggle over life and death, but the boundary between science fiction and social reality is an optical illusion. 

I am making an argument for the cyborg as a fiction mapping our social and bodily reality and as an imaginative resource suggesting some very fruitful couplings. 

By the late twentieth century, our time, a mythic time, we are all chimeras, theorized and fabricated hybrids of machine and organism. In short, we are cyborgs. The cyborg is our ontology; it gives us our politics. The cyborg is a condensed image of both imagination and material reality, the two joined centers structuring any possibility of historical transformation. 

...utopian tradition of imagining a world without gender, which perhaps a world without genesis. but maybe a world without end. 

The cyborg is a creature in a post-gender world; it has no truck with bisexuality. through final appropriation of all powers of the parts into a higher unity. 

"a cybernetic organism, a creature of social reality as well as a creature of fiction" (Simian 151)

" ...the cyborg has been instantly and systematically appropriated by the tradition of representation, and come to stand for many of a human figure - solider, spaceman, woman, foreigner, the disabled, the privileged, the underprivileged , white,, black and so on. The practice of (mis)representing the cyborg, particularly in literary studies and social sciences, is most evident in the discussion of teratology, where the cyborg is associated with traditional monsters. "

"all forms of talk about what it means to be human - and post/human-are representations, forged within cultural contexts"





Rosi Braidotti

How We Became Posthuman

First, the posthuman view privileges informational pattern over material instantiation, so that embodiment in a biological substrate is seen as an accident of history rather than an inevitabilityoflife. Second, the posthuman view considers consciousness, re- Toward Embodied Virtuality I 3 garded as the seat of human identity in the Western tradition long before Descartes thought he was a mind thinking, as an epiphenomenon, as an evolutionary upstart trying to claim that it is the whole show when in actuality it is only a minor sideshow. Third, the posthuman view thinks of the body as the original prosthesis we all learn to manipulate, so that extending or replacing the body with other prostheses becomes a continuation of a process that began before we were born. Fourth, and most important, by these and other means, the posthuman view configures human being so that it can be seamlessly articulated with intelligent machines. In the posthuman, there are no essential differences or absolute demarcations between bodily existence and computer simulation, cybernetic mechanism and biological organism, robot teleology and human goals.