I feel really silly. I read the essays that were suppose to be for the next assignment and posted on them instead of Haraway. You could imagine my surprise when I realized this in class. I guess I’ll have to re-post now. Since we went over Haraway before I read it, I felt that I would have an advantage on the subject, but I was wrong again. I had a hard rime deciphering the whole piece and I just wound up getting frustrated with it. I can tell you right now, just by looking at this piece, I would not have understood any of it if we had not gone over it in class. All the talk about “cyborgs” had my head spinning. I decided to Wikipedia it. Wikipedia says that:“A cyborg is a cybernetic organism (i.e. an organism that is “steered” using biofeedback). The term was coined in 1960 when Manfred Clynes and Nathan Kline used it to describe a self-regulating human-machine system in outer space.[1] Ever since then, it has been a creature that complicates traditional boundaries between mind (or spirit) and matter: D. S. Halacy’s Cyborg: Evolution of the Superman in 1965 featured an introduction by Manfred Clynes, who wrote of a “new frontier” that was “not merely space, but more profoundly the relationship between ‘inner space’ to ‘outer space’ -a bridge…between mind and matter.”[2] The cyborg is often seen today merely as an organism that has enhanced abilities due to technology,[3] but this perhaps oversimplifies the category of feedback. Fictional cyborgs are portrayed as a synthesis of organic and synthetic parts, and frequently pose the question of difference between human and machine as one concerned with morality, free will, and emphathy. Fictional cyborgs may be represented as visibly mechanical (e.g. the Borg in the Star Trek franchise or the Cylons from the 1978 TV series, Battlestar Galactica); or as almost indistinguishable from humans (e.g. the Cylons from the re-imagining of Battlestar Galactica). These fictional portrayals often register our society’s discomfort with its seemingly increasing reliance upon technology, particularly when used for war, and when used in ways that seem to threaten free will. Real cyborgs are more frequently people who use cybernetic technology to repair or overcome the physical and mental constraints of their bodies.”
Ok, so now that I understand what that is, maybe I can figure out some of what she is saying. On page 2269 Haraway writes: Contemporary science fiction is full of cyborgs-creatures simultaneously animal and machine, who populate worlds ambiguously natural and crafted.” She goes on to talk about modern medicine as being full of cyborgs as well as sex and how “cyborg replication is uncoupled from organic reproduction.” I thought about these few short sentences and I think they kind of make some sense to me. Now that I know what a cyborg is, I can pick them out in things I see in my everyday life. Take the movie The Terminator (1984). The whole time I was reading this; this is what I was thinking of. Is there really machine type people walking around today? I just think that would be insane, but then I realized it’s not exactly impossible. They create mechanical limbs for people who lost them. Like Annie had mentioned in class, there are machines that keep people alive today, so I thought it’s not that bizarre to think of our society having Terminators walking around, although I think that would cause some other problems.
On page 2272 Haraway says: “basically machines were not self-moving, self-designing, autonomous. They could not achieve man’s dream, only mock it. They were not man, an author to himself, but only a caricature of that masculinist reproductive dream. To think they were otherwise was paranoid. Now we are not so sure.” I think that she is right here. I believe that someday, maybe next week, maybe even years from now, that machine will take over. No, I’m not talking about it in “Terminator terms.” What I mean is that I think that machines will basically run our world and there will really be no use for humans. If you think back to pre-machine time, there was no need for them. Hell, the Egyptians build the pyramids with out a mechanical machine. They used good old wheel barrels and their hands. Before cars, people use to walk, before hospitals, people used to fix themselves, before ovens there was fire. The list just goes on and on. I really think that people are just lazy nowadays. We truly don’t need machines, but I don’t think that they will ever go away. I think that they were first meant for entertainment and to make life easier, but I think that we have gone a bit over board in the past decade or so. I mean come one, I just heard on the news that cell phones are killing all of the bumble bees in the world. Einstein predicted that it all the bumble bees die, then the world dies in about 4 years. So, maybe the whole terminator thing isn’t exactly that crazy. Maybe machines will destroy our world, but just in a different way, and we won’t even know it until it happens.
