In my last blog post, I explored the dynamics of N. Katherine Hayles' project in How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics. In this blog post, however, I will put Hayles' project in conversation with that of Donna Haraway in "A Cyborg Manifesto," placing a particular emphasis on the ways in which their conceptualizations of the human body converge and/or depart from one another.
Though written nearly ten years before How We Became Posthuman (1999), Haraway's "A Cyborg Manifesto" (1991) still shares a relatively common vernacular with Hayles in terms of how they both write about intersections between informational code and the human body. Indeed, much like Haraway, who suggests that understanding the discursive boundaries of the human body involves "the translation of the world into a problem of coding" (327), Hayles similarly frames her own argument around the transition to virtuality and a virtual age as a significant cultural shift in which "material objects are interpenetrated by information patterns" (13-14). In their respective pieces, Haraway and Hayles treat "coding" and "informational patterns" as touchstones for articulating and intellectualizing the human body and the material spaces through which it navigates. In so doing, they do not so much emphasize the static, hegemonic, and implacable nature of information and knowledge so much as the prospects for transgressing and/or contesting existing dominant codes and discursive boundaries.
For Haraway, internalizing this perspective on information means not so much thinking "in terms of essential properties, but in terms of design, boundary constraints, rates of flows, systems logics, costs of lowering constraints" (325). The salient point in both of their projects therefore centers on the idealized prospect of divesting oneself of the constraints, limitations, and patterns of the world in which marginalized and socialized individuals are situated, and thus enacting and performing alternative subjectivities. These alternative subjectivities therefore emerge from imagined and/or performative spaces, spaces that, in Hayles' estimation, re-constitute boundaries and "change the locus of selfhood" (279), therefore "offer[ing] resources for the construction of another kind of account" (288) of reality as more fluid, malleable, and open to interpretation.
Though both Haraway and Hayles locate much of this liberatory and subversive potential in and around performances and discourses of the human body, their specific points of entry for initiating this dialogue are slightly different.
For Haraway, the notion of the cyborg serves as the medium or mythos through which one might re-work hegemonic, patriarchal, and capitalistic codes and re-draw the discursive boundaries against which the social realities of gender, race, and class consciousness are determined and embodied. "A cyborg," according to Haraway, "is a cybernetic organism, a hybrid of machine and organism, a creature of social reality as well as a creature of fiction. Social reality is lived social relations, our most important political construction, a world-changing fiction" (315). By crafting the cyborg around both "social reality" and "fiction," Haraway seeks to elucidate upon the ways in which individuals are constituted, but not determined, by a multitude of dominant codes and restrictive social structures. While these codes and structures are "lived" and "real" in the sense that they act as the social, cultural, and political spaces through which individuals navigate, Haraway places a particular emphasis on the interests, structures, and institutions that such spaces actually serve. In this sense, codes and structures are not so much "objective" realities and/or "self-evident" truths so much as potent and pervasive fictions and propaganda that organize and dictate the terms of "reality" and intelligible life. This sense of reality and "intelligible life," however, comprises just one constitutive piece of the cyborg, a piece that the cyborg might "disassemble" and "reassemble," all under aegis of exposing the fact that "no 'natural' architectures constrain system design" (326).
Like Haraway, Hayles is also committed to problematizing the purported "'natural' architectures" of "reality" and intelligible life. Unlike Haraway, though, Hayles does not use the cyborg or any other related mythos to articulate her project. Instead, Hayles frames her project around the "interplay between the body as a cultural construct and experiences of embodiment that individual people within a culture feel and articulate" (193). This interplay ultimately makes an important distinction between "the human body" and "embodiment." While "the human body" serves as an "idealized form" (196) that connotes and prescribes particular behaviors and manners of being, "embodiment" serves as the actual material performance of various behaviors and manners of being. These material performances of "the human body," as Hayles emphatically suggests, might, on the one hand, align and enact the existing tenets that comprise "the human body," but, on the other hand, they also offer opportunities for "randomness," opportunities that subvert, transgress, and contest the entire institution of "the human body." In this sense, "bodily practices have a physical reality that can never be fully assimilated into discourse" (195). Ultimately, by integrating "randomness" into and onto existing dominant codes and discursive boundaries, "embodiment" functions as "the creative ground from which lnew] pattern[s] can emerge" (286).
Where I feel that their projects might not necessarily overlap is in the way that they position the transgressive potential for their respective conceptualizations of the human body. In "A Cyborg Manifesto," Haraway indicates that "[t]he cyborg is a creature in a post-gender world; it has no truck with bisexuality, pre-oedipal symbols, unalienated labour, or other seductions to organic wholeness through a final appropriation of all the powers of the parts into a higher unity" (316). Though locating the cyborg in a "post-gender world" might serve more as a rhetorical feature for her project, I feel that it is important to note that Haraway is in fact imagining materialities and discourses well outside of the confines of "reality" and our immediate surroundings. Hayles, on the other hand, takes a more sobering and pragmatic approach in her analysis on Philip K. Dick's work when she suggests that "the construction of the observer cannot finally be separated from the construction reality" (190). While I feel that Hayles' project certainly hinges on the sorts of material and discursive imaginaries that comprise Haraway's notion of the cyborg, I also feel that the breadth and trajectory of Hayles' project cautions against divorcing and/or divesting oneself from lived reality. But, again, these distinctions may speak more to the rhetorical scaffolding of their respective projects than any profound or substantive difference in their general approach to the prospects for transgression and subversion.
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