Notes from Haraway and Turkle
Haraway 1985
Cyborg subjectivity is made possible by the crossing of borders: human-animal, organism-machine, physical-non-physical.
The cyborg is a condensed image of both imagination and material reality, the two joined centers structuring any possibility of historical transformation. In the traditions of “Western” science and politics—the tradition of racist, male-dominant capitalism; the tradition of progress; the tradition of the appropriation of nature as resource for the productions of culture; the tradition of reproduction of the self from the reflections of the other—the relation between organism and machine has been a border war. (Haraway 2006:118)
Communications technologies and biotechnologies are the crucial tools recrafting our bodies. These tools embody and enforce new social relations for women world-wide. Technologies and scientific discourses can be partially understood as formalizations, i.e., as frozen moments, of the fluid social interactions constituting them, but they should also be viewed as instruments
for enforcing meanings (Haraway 2006:130).
More on posthumanism (from a philosophical perspective):
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Turkle 1994
MUDs: Multi-User Dungeons
Displacement of authorship, decentering of self: “There is an unparalleled opportunity to play with one’s identity and to ‘try out’ new ones (Turkle 1994:159).
PC as evocative object: “it provoked self -reflection and stimulated thought. It led to reevaluations and reconsiderations of things taken for granted, for example, about the nature of intelligence, free will, and our notions of what is alive” (Turkle 1994:164).
From the perspective of cyborgs, freed of the need to ground politics in “our” privileged position of the oppression that incorporates all other dominations, the innocence of the merely violated, the ground of those closer to nature, we can see powerful possibilities (Haraway 2006:142).