Donna Haraway - Cyborg Manifesto

Irony is a great tool for conceptually uniting disparate elements in the event they are relevant and true, and that of which does not resolve, or need to be resolved

Cyborgs are a hybrid of machine and organism, of both reality and fiction

"Social reality is lived social relations, our most important political construction, a world-changing fiction"

The liberation of experience lies in the possibilities of an imagined experience, and what entails the woman's experience in society. The hybrid of machine and organism is both the reality and possible fiction of women's experience. The line between social reality and science fiction is also speculative.

Reality is already replete with cyborgs in industry, medicine and military applications, where replication is divorced from antiquated notions of sexuality. But, the cyborg can be an imaginative resource to redefine our social and bodily realities into the fictions of possibility.

The mesh of machine and organism has already subsumed our reality, and exists as a condensed surface entailing both material reality and imagination. The boundaries between machine and organism have become the sites of confusion and battle, and in this struggle to define the edges can be found the source for liberation, where production, reproduction and imagination are founts to create new salients of resistance. Where the indefinable areas can replace staid institutions of gender, race, class with new structures of anti-progress. "A world without genesis, but also a world without end".

The human/machine hybrid is free of the drive/desire predictability of gender based determinism derived from an original state of a common unity. It fully embraces a non-linear relationship with the social and physical. Nature need not be consumed for culture. Being the bastard offspring of militarism and patriarchal capitalism, cyborgs have the prerogative to delegitimize the need for fathers.

Anthropocentric thought is another battleground in the cyborg condition. Lines that separate human behaviour with animal have been breached as defining patterns such as language, tool use, and social behaviour can be interchanged among species. The cyborg becomes present where the border between human and animal is breached. The next front opens up regarding the distinction on what defines organisms from machines. Ambiguity now exists between natural and artificial, mind and body, previously clearly defined areas that differentiated the inanimate from the animate. Current machine technology shatters these notions as autonomous and self-replicating. What is defined as essential nature in completely undermined. The politics of the who the cyborg will be goes beyond technological determinism or fatalist concepts of the destruction of humankind. Lastly, the boundary between physical and non-physical is tenuous at best. Information as data packets transcending physical geography through sections of the electromagnetic spectrum give cyborgs the essence of fluidity. The cyborg dream is everywhere and invisible, as difficult to comprehend politically as materially. They consist of the sciences with the most boundary confusion, and thus can be used as oppositional strategies by those marginalised by the militant order of masculine labour.

A cyborg world allows for a multiplicity of opinions, social and bodily realities that contradict one another, kinship with nature and machines, partial and joint identities and political struggles viewed from opposing perspectives unimaginable previously.

Defining identities is by definition problematic by the nature of exclusionary tendencies. Feminism is fractured along many lines of social realities whereby indentitarian politics enforce differences rather than encourage unity. Affinity with these separate divisions encourages coalition on common grounds of those forces raised through consciousness of patriarchy, colonialism and capitalism.