• quote worthy
  • "we already have a whole generation of young people
  • who are already hybrid cyborgs
  • They live half their life on the internet"
    • host quoting Elise Bohan from her book

• comment
  • I think many of us have had this thought!
    • that when we die, vast amounts of wisdom is extinguished along with that person
    • As our digital tools become more sophisticated, however,
  • we are uploading our libraries to the digital collective intelligence network
    • the internet may well evolve to become the epitome and master repository of human cumulative cultural evolution.
    • even AI could not exist if it did not mine a training set of billions of human and their shared ideas
    • Perhaps it is the internet which is the vehicle for collective hybridized human-cyborg immortality?
    • If knowledge is preserved this way, then this flavor of immortality is only meaningful for our species

I do think Haraway could have written it in a much more approachable way. The manifesto is using cyborg as a symbol of boundary transgression. So many binary relations are broken down, that of human and animal, men and women, organism and machine, physical and non-physical, reality and culture, the mortal and immortal, because a cyborg could be both. Overall this piece of writing causes more anxiety in me than elation. When the boundaries between human and animal, organism and machine, mortal and immortal all been broken down, what would befall humanities? What changes would it bring to literature writing/studies? It’s been normally agreed that literature is about human conditions, but what becomes literature when human beings in its original sense, which is dismantled by the cyborg myth, won’t exist? The piece is also an attack against traditional feminist position. The idea of a cyborg is supposed to dissolve differences and hierarchies based on gender, race. What about age and class? Wouldn't cyborgs become most efficient capitalist war machines, colonial instruments? Isn’t the concept of “cyborg” itself a hegemonic idea that exclude those who don’t have access to technology? In China, people without a smart phone can’t book a taxi, order takeouts, make a payment in certain business areas, or even enter any public space during the pandemic control period. What about those women, who haven’t gained equal status as a human being in the Enlightenment sense, suddenly being forced into a posthuman era? Isn’t this a violent erasing of the oppression and struggles those women have suffered and endured? Isn’t this breaking down of boundaries often the cause rather than the way out of our sense of dislocation and identity crises?

The goddess is referring to the societal bounds that women are objectified to. That at the time, women were placed into. Men would idealize this "women", this perfect being that stays away from harsh truths, or anything against the purity of a perfected goddess image. Being a cyborg, allows for the indiivdual, the women, to be open and anything she wants. Which is why Cyborg > Goddess

A pertinent video which could be annotated in multiple ways by addressing the agency of accessories as a form of empowerment for drag people in a new subjectivity.

Some guiding questions raised by your topic and your in-class presentation:

1. How will you convey defamiliarization by using the psychoanalytic of Freud through the point of view of the objects?

2. Do you think about incorporating comparative analysis of drag's objects used in performances?

3. In your scholarly sources, will you allude to how posthuman drags can reassert their role in society in an "embodied" way?

As you mentioned in your presentation, I would say that the idea that accessories can become a state of becoming into a cyborg figure (machine aesthetic) could be explored in relation to a vitalist materialist approach to a certain extent.

I had to come back to this when I had a memory flash-back. My oldest daughter had Polio before we adopted her from China. For years she had to wear a full leg brace (KAFO) to keep her from hyper-extending her weak and somewhat underdeveloped leg. At first people assumed the brace was temporary, but eventually she started calling it her "bionic leg." It worked. People laughed. It opened up a conversation about her leg rather than making it an object of negative conjecture.

So, to diffuse ideas about disability, difference, and "other," she took on the identity of a cyborg, which acted rhetorically and psychologically on herself and others to diminish the "other" distinction. Calling herself a cyborg became a rhetoric of inclusion.

As opposed to the robots in WestWorld: they look human, they have skin and blood, but the emphasis is mostly on the code that makes them behave in certain ways.

I wouldn't say that I consider the "hosts" in WestWorld to be cyborgs--they are not part machine, part human-- they are all machine. Or is skin the definition of human? How much human material does it take to be cyborg?

I like this phrase.