Harraway
Social reality is lived social relations, our most important political construction
Liberation rests on the construction of the consciousness, the imaginative apprehension, of oppression, and so of possibility.
Modern production seems like a dream of cyborg colonization work,
And modern war is a cyborg orgy, coded by C3I, command-control-communication-intelligence
the cyborg as a fiction mapping our social and bodily reality
Michael Foucault's biopolitics
Ths cyborg is our ontology; it gives us our politics.
the tradition of reproduction of the self from the reflections of the other
production, reproduction, and imagination.
irony since the cyborg is also the awful apocalyptic telos of the 'West's' escalating dominations of abstract individuation, an ultimate self untied at last from all dependency, a man in space
An origin story in the 'Western', humanist sense depends on the myth of original unity, fullness, bliss and terror, represented by the phallic mother from whom all humans must separate, the task of individual development and of history,
The cyborg skips the step of original unity, of identification with nature in the Western sense
the one can no longer be the resource for appropriation or incorporation by the other.
produced modern organisms as objects of knowledge
human animality
the boundary between physical and non-physical is very imprecise for us
Writing, power, and technology are old partners in Western stories of the origin of civilization Miniaturization
The ubiquity and invisibility of cyborgs
The diseases evoked by these clean machines are 'no more' than the minuscule coding changes of an antigen in the immune system, 'no more' than the experience of stress.
FRACTURED IDENTITIES Identities seem contradictory, partial, and strategic Which identities are available to ground such a potent political myth called 'us', and what could motivate enlistment in this collectivity — the sources of a crisis in political identity are legion. The recent history for much of the US left and US feminism has been a response to this kind of crisis by endless splitting and searches for a new essential unity. But there has also been a growing recognition of another response through coalition — affinity, not identity.
oppositional consciousness (Chela Sandoval)
Unity-through-domination or unity-through-incorporation
History and polyvocality disappear into political taxonomies that try to establish genealogies
'Advanced capitalism' is inadequate to convey the structure of this historical moment.
THE INFORMATICS OF DOMINATION movement from an organic, industrial society to a polymorphous, information system
+chart of transitions
Human beings, like any other component or subsystem, must be localized in a system architecture whose basic modes of operation are probabilistic, statistical
Communications technologies and biotechnologies are the crucial tools recrafting our bodies. These tools embody and enforce new social relations , Technologies and scientific discourses can be partially understood as formalizations but they should also be viewed as instruments for enforcing meanings. Furthermore, communications sciences and modern biologies are constructed by a common move — the translation of the world into a problem of coding, a search for a common language in which all resistance to instrumental control disappears and all heterogeneity can be submitted to disassembly, reassembly, investment, and exchange. In communications sciences, the translation of the world into a problem in coding can be illustrated by looking at cybernetic (feedback-controlled) systems theories applied to telephone technology, computer design, weapons deployment, or data base construction and maintenance. In each case, solution to the key questions rests on a theory of language and control; the key operation is determining the rates, directions, and probabilities of flow of a quantity called information. The world is subdivided by boundaries differentially permeable to information. Information is just that kind of quantifiable element (unit, basis of unity) which allows universal translation, and so unhindered instrumental power (called effective communication).''
The only way to characterize the informatics of domination is as a massive intensification of insecurity and cultural impoverishment, with common failure of subsistence networks for the most vulnerable.
The 'New Industrial Revolution' is producing a new world-wide working class, as well as new sexualities and ethnicities.
Gordon 'homework economy'-new technologies
commercial/ early industrial, monopoly, multinational) —( nationalism, imperialism, and multinationali) and related to Jameson's three dominant aesthetic periods of realism, modernism, and postmodernism ) specific forms of families dialectically relate to forms of capital 1) the patriarchal nuclear family, structured by the dichotomy between public and private, white bourgeois ideology (2) the modern family mediated or enforced) by the welfare state and institutions like the family wage, with a flowering of a-feminist heterosexual ideologies, (3) the 'family' of the homework economy with its oxymoronic structure of women-headed households and its explosion of feminisms and the paradoxical intensification and erosion of gender itself.
The new technologies affect the social relations of both sexuality and of reproduction
Sociobiological stories depend on a high-tech view of the body as a biotic component or cybernetic communications system. Technologies of visualization
I prefer a network ideological image, suggesting the profusion of spaces and identities and the permeability of boundaries in the personal body and in the body politic. 'Networking' is both a feminist practice and a multinational corporate strategy — weaving is for oppositional cyborgs
Home, Market, Paid Work Place, State, School, Clinic-Hospital, and Church. There is no 'place' for women in these networks, only geometries of difference and contradiction crucial to women's cyborg identities.
The cyborg does not dream of community on the model of the organic family