Cyborg feminism and transhumanism
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- Опубликовано: 8 сен 2024
- Donna Haraway's 1985 'Manifesto for Cyborgs' is a landmark essay for what is often termed 'cyberfeminism', the postgender, post-Western, post-Marxist, post-Oedipal expression of feminism in our day. Rather than an extension of the feminist political project of gaining power for women equal to men, it argues against the very category of women as essentially different from men.
With respect to human nature, Haraway, like Foucault, is constructivist rather than an essentialist.
She expresses her manifesto for constructivism as a means of escaping the varied traditional mythologies of the West (and we might observe through every human culture). Like zombies, but without the negative connotations, cyborgs lie in the boundary between organic life and the machine world. A biologist by training as well as a literary theorist, Haraway embraces the destruction of the conceptual boundaries been human and animal, organism and machine, and the physical and non-physical world in the post-WWII technical-scientific establishment.
Thereby she announces one of the challenges of our age largely ignored by Christian theologians. Our contemporary age, while thoroughly Gnostic in accordance with its Cartesian beginnings, is nonetheless also entirely deterministic and utilitarian in the way it regards human nature and the human body. Progress is measured by the transgression of all limitations to the exercise of the human will, with the sole exception of the flimsy ethical notion of consent. The result is the total domination of our making over our being as humans. And along with the loss of human nature, there is a consequent loss of the capacity to reason about it.
For me, the modern technological university, in accepting these goals as its own, not only sacrifices human dignity, but also the very possibility of the knowledge of transcendental beauty, truth, and goodness.
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I remember how puzzled I was when I was forced to engage with this topic when preparing for my BA thesis in Latin American literature (University of Warsaw, Poland). I just couldn’t understand why it was relevant, but the teacher seemed to idolize Haraway (and Foucault, Derrida etc). She didn’t accept any of my ideas because they weren’t political and I had to change the topic several times. I ended up writing about so called ecocritism because it was far more tolerable than feminism (everyone else in my group chose the latter).
Literature is one of my biggest interests but when you want to study it nowadays it’s not really about analyzing and interpreting books with a humanistic approach, it’s all cultural marxism- you have to criticize and rebel against something. This is why I didn’t continue my studies and don’t think I ever will, which makes your channel a huge blessing.
I am sorry but not surprised to hear that that was your experience.
Glad if my little channel can provide a remedy.
Thank you for this thorough and clear lecture. I learned a lot about this complex paper and ideology of the Cyborg.
Let me tell you a little story about my experience with liberal feminists in my country. I, once in a seminar, argued that trans-women must be barred from entering women's sports of all kinds. It culminated in me being called transphobic, misogynist, etc., by some of my peers. I reckon cultural studies are debasing the actual essence of any texts. It's crazy how easy it is to enroll in a Ph.D. program that pertains to cultural, liberal studies, but twice as challenging to even find a slot in actual literary studies.
women.
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Progress brings, to the cyborg, the ability to improve survivability as well as redundancy. People, in the cybog's furtue, won't have the same attitudes towards violence, since the act of killing someone or damaging something becomes increasingly irrelevant as logical efficiency increases.
Violence is the result of tribalism and resource allocation. Technology reduces the space that needs to be traversed, puts restraints on population growth, and increases resource efficiency. As long as those factors are in a progressive mode, and large populations aren't barred from accessing these essential technologies, violence will be reduced (though singular incidents of violence may be more catastrophic).
The comment about trans-persons in sports, that you gave a thumbs up to, is you just not owning up the the fact that there is a cultural shift at work, primarily accelerated by technology. Barring people from participating in women's sports is inevitably doomed to fail, as that category begins to change. Technology is already filling the gap in sexual dimophism. The only thing that really needs to change, for some evolutionary shift is our feelings of the aesthetic. Change what sexual pressures are there, add in technological tweaks, and the humans in this cyborg future are completely unrecognizable to you - both physically and ethically.
Your feelings on the matter are pretty immaterial. What is, will be. Traditions all fail to the tide of progress.
Fascinating comment
Part of the comment made here sounds rather economically oriented. As Kaplan once quipped, "Economics has its place--just not the whole place, please." Resource allocation only matters when there are scarce resources, and that would appear to be a permanent condition of the world we have always lived in. There are some very good studies that indicate that no matter how terrible or wonderful a person's temporary situation is or has been, in about 6 months, the level of their subjective feelings returns to the state they held before the temporary event occured (e.g., winning the lottery, losing a partner, etc.). Again and again, these kinds of recognitions encourage us to give deep thought to the essential nature of human nature, as the good Dr. Masson says. Every argument that bears down on the importance of the allocation of scarce resources emphasizes a materialist point of view. (Yeah, if we just had more and better stuff, all of our cares would disappear.)
Like it or not, artificial intelligence is here to stay. What humanity does with it, is perhaps the most pertinent issue. Understanding what truly makes us human, and the course of our own human evolution, is the determinate factor. Expanding Knowledge 🌎
shut up