User:Eleanorg/1.2/RWR/Annotation: A Cyborg Manifesto

Annotation of 'A Cyborg Manifesto'

Haraway, D. (2002) 'A Cyborg Manifesto' in Spiller, N. (ed.) Cyber Reader (London: Phiadon).

Haraway's essay, a book chapter from 1985, sketches the changing political landscape of the late 21st century, outlining how new technologies will both facilitate political/economic domination and also offer avenues of resistance. The central tenet of the essay is the notion that communications and bio- technologies tend to dissolve previously stable boundaries: "... we are living through a movement from an organic, industrial society to a polymorphous, information system..." (Haraway 2002, p.110.) Politically, this translates as an intensification of Marx's notion of universal equivalence essential to monetary exchange; now, not only are objects exchangeable but "no objects, spaces or bodies are sacred in themselves; any component can be interfaced with any other if the proper standard, the proper code, can be constructed for processing signals in a common language." (ibid p.111.) The maintenance of (hierarchical) power will depend, says Haraway, on reducing resistance to the flow of data across boundaries: "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." (ibid p.112.)

Haraway thus envisions a world in which the logic of the 'free market' is applied to the flow of data, which Power/capital requires to be totally unhindered by previously impermeable boundaries. New communications technology makes this possible, because "information is just that kind of quantifiable element (unit, base of unity) which allows universal translation, and so unhindered instrumental power (called effective communication)." (ibid p.112-113.) It logically follows, then, that "the biggest threat to such power is interruption of communication." (ibid p.113.)

Notes

I wonder how the predictions of this essay map onto the current copyright wars. It seems that capitalism wants to have its cake and eat it: globalisation of data and erasure of boundaries to information flow = essential to information economy. BUT, it also provides the very tools which subvert it, eg by making scarcity of digital 'goods' obsolete (bittorrent). So, we see Power arguing now for the opposite of free flow of data; re-asserting the supposed 'integrity' of objects like films and songs, and attempting to drastically limit/police information flow, in a move that Haraway doesn't seem to have predicted here. Where can I find writings which address this contradiction/oversight?