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 we are living through a movement from an organic, industrial society to a polymorphous, information system--from all work to all play, a deadly game. +chart of transitions 'Integrity' or 'sincerity' of the Western self gives way to decision procedures and expert systems. Human beings, like any other component or subsystem, must be localized in a system architecture whose basic modes of operation are probabilistic, statistical The dichotomies are all in question ideologically. The home, workplace, market, public arena, the body itself- all can be dispersed and interfaced in nearly infinite, polymorphous ways, with large consequences for women and others.

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 biggest threat to such power is interruption of communication. Any system breakdown is a function of stress. The fundamentals of this technology can be condensed into the metaphor C31, command-controlcommunication-intelligence, the military's symbol for its operations theory. Communications technologies depend on electronics,micro-electronics is the technical basis of simulacra; that is, of copies without originals.

The 'New Industrial Revolution' is producing a new world-wide working class, as well as new sexualities and ethnicities.

Gordon 'homework economy'